Neurodiverse Communication

I really appreciated watching Mel Baggs’ “In My Language” for its emphasis on the validity of neurodivergent, and specifically autistic, ways of communicating and existing and their inateness to personhood. I feel that it is so rare to be exposed to different ways of interacting with the world on the terms of individuals themselves from their lived experience, so I was excited to learn more from Baggs’ visualization and contextualization of their experience. It was really interesting to hear Baggs describe their ways of being and communicating as an Autistic person as being in “constant conversation with everything in [their] environment”. Especially in the kind of normed social environments created by capitalist idealism and structures of academia, it was valuable to be reminded of not only the importance, but the necessity, of recognizing and learning from such ways of thinking, being in, and interacting with the world that diverge from the norms and standards so exalted within traditional academic and professional spaces. Failing to recognize these differences and incorporate them into bases of knowledge inherently illegitimizes the existence of neurodivergent experiences and identities. As we, as students in higher education, prominently exist in such spaces, it is interesting to think about ways to incorporate and acknowledge a range of neurodiverse thought and communication styles, and challenge the culture in which, as Baggs says, “the thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language”. It seems that so many academic disciplines could benefit from the incorporation of different “languages” and a more expansive understanding of ways of thinking.