Neuroqueer Play is a practice-based research project that begins with a simple question: what might change if neurodiversity were treated not as something to fix or accommodate, but as a starting point for imagining different ways of living together? The project explores how play can function as a method and art as a space for reflection, opening cracks in dominant ideas of value, time, productivity, and “doing things right.” It operates as an open and flexible framework: a participatory space in which people are invited to show up as they are, experiment together, and imagine alternative social possibilities in uncertain times.
The project brings together experimental workshops, playful artifacts, and artistic documentation to cultivate alternative ways of learning and being—ways in which difference is not tolerated but anticipated, needed, and allowed to remain present without being smoothed out. Neurodivergent, creative, and multisensory perspectives act as guiding forces, shaping both the process and the form of the research. At its core is a sense of playfulness: a curious and sometimes unruly mode of engagement that resists productivity-driven systems and their rigid scripts of efficiency, coherence, and linear time, while also questioning institutional ways of knowing.
A series of workshops forms the heart of the research and is approached as collective experiments in unlearning and unmasking. Through themes such as embodiment, sensory discovery, queer temporalities, and more-than-human ways of knowing, participants engage in playful and reflective practices. What emerges from these encounters feeds into an outcome: a playful, open-source Neuroqueer Play Practices kit: designed to be used, adapted, and reactivated by neurodivergent creatives, communities, and allies to practice neuroqueering. As a prefigurative practice, Neuroqueer Play approaches transformation as an open-ended process, emphasizing experimentation and collective exploration over predetermined outcomes. It rehearses alternative ways of relating, learning, and being together; ways grounded in care, plurality, and shared curiosity, and in the belief that play can be a serious tool for social change.
