This thesis is a pandisciplinary autos account of the processes and experience of conducting a PhD, from the perspective of an autistic student concurrently living with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Prior research investigates the lived experience of autistic people and those with bipolar disorder in assorted fields and situations within education. However, despite there being a significant focus on autism in early years education, there is a profound lack of experiential research by autistic people and/or people with bipolar disorder who are themselves engaging in doctoral research. The specific contribution this thesis offers is a first hand insight into how autism and bipolar disorder manifest in the multiply-divergent lived experience of a PhD student researcher, their practical and analytical processes to doctoral research, and the resulting academic output produced; the thesis. My research takes into account neurologically domain specific experience to manifest a panneurologically recognisable research methodology - autox - which accounts for both autistic and bipolar experience in research. Significantly, I seek to investigate and present the work in my innate language; to challenge the pathologising of neurological difference as being an autopoietic construct of neurologically and socially normative expectations - a domain function which determines ‘what 𝑥 can be’; a system which disables natural neurologically domain specific ethico-onto-epistemic processes of meaning making and erodes the academic value of that which is most impactful and novel to the neuromajority.I utilise Beer’s cybernetic systems approach to map the motion of the student through the system. This motion is not frictionless, and implies a doing, and engaging in and with the world. Methodologically the research employs a Baradian diffractive methodology, and is situated in the philosophy of Walker’s Neurodiversity Paradigm. By entangling Barad and Walker within the non-geometric topology of my research using gedanken, I neuroqueer the optic Linearities of reflection and representationalism which (re)produce apparatus/object/observer and knowledge/discourse/power, and give power to the NonLinearities that produce my entangled (and sometimes disentangled), musical (and nonmusical), human (and nonhuman), multiply-neurodivergent experiences of meaning making - In which my account of ‘meaning making’ is defined as a post-creativity, continual ethical exchange of dynamic practices of intra-action by (a posthumanist concept of) bodyminds (intertwined body/mind) and the world, which produces material embodied phenomena. What I seek via these modes of inquiry is the novel concept of a neurologically domain specific philosophy; which is no hinterland in the active minds and lives of the neurominority, yet has no tradition in mainstream philosophy or academia. Rather than a philosophy of autism, which ‘borrows’ from neurologically different perspectives and assimilates these into normative tradition, and/or autiphobic thinking which seeks to address ‘pathological deficits’ with the neurodivergent mind; autistic philosophy, or neurodivergent philosophy, or neuroqueer philosophy, is the natural antonym of phóbos. Through my special interest (love; philia) in music and the mechanisms and dynamics of neurodivergent experience, this work systematically seeks affirmation in the original definition of the Greek soph (σωφ / wisdom), using the unique vehicle of the PhD.
| Date of Award | 18 Dec 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Bryn Harrison (Main Supervisor) & Eddie Dobson (Co-Supervisor) |
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