Voices at the Margins

Positive Disintegration

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Voices at the Margins

Episode 83: Podcasting as Neuroqueer Collaborative Autoethnography and Epistemic Healing

Chris Wells, Emma Nicholson, Caitlin Hughes, and 2 others

Mar 31, 2026

Episode 83 includes something we’ve never done before on Positive Disintegration. It’s a conversation among seven neurodivergent podcasters—recorded as part of a peer-reviewed paper that has just been published in Neurodiversity journal. The paper, “Voices at the Margins: Podcasting as Neuroqueer Collaborative Autoethnography and Epistemic Healing,” positions podcasting as a research methodology within critical neurodiversity studies, and this conversation is the data.

The seven of us—Caitlin Hughes, Chris Wells, Emma Nicholson, Bee Mayhew, Sheldon Gay, Marni Kammersell, and Teena Mogler—sat down together to explore what podcasting makes possible that other forms of research and advocacy cannot. What emerged was a conversation about voice, belonging, lived experience as expertise, and the kind of knowledge that forms between people when they’re allowed to think out loud together.

Rather than following a rigid script, we were guided by five open-ended questions that Caitlin designed to hold space for relational dialogue and reflexive sense-making. We talked about the inaccessibility of traditional knowledge spaces, what it means to reclaim lived experience as valid and generative knowledge, and the truths that live in contradiction, tangents, and half-finished thoughts. We also explored how this kind of podcasting ripples outward into neurodivergent community and belonging.

The paper identifies nine resonances that emerged from the recording, including voice as epistemic repair, messiness as method, lived experience as expertise, multiplicity and difference as community, and humor and play as co-regulation. If you’ve ever felt like this podcast gave you permission to be unfinished, or helped you see yourself outside of yourself—that’s the ripple we’re talking about.

Read the full paper (open access): https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330261437265

Published in: Neurodiversity, Volume 4, Special Issue: Towards a Critical Turn in Neurodiversity Studies: Bridging the Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences

The podcasters in this episode:

Caitlin Hughes (she/they) is a queer, nonbinary, multi-exceptional Australian social worker, researcher, educator, and advocate. Late-identified as Autistic, ADHD, Gifted, and PDA, Caitlin co-hosts the Divergent Dialogues podcast and brings a lived experience-led perspective to their work. They are committed to fostering epistemic healing through relational ethics, narrative reclamation, and accessible, lived experience–driven knowledge creation.
Chris Wells (they/them) is a multi-exceptional, nonbinary, and neurodivergent writer, podcaster, and developmental theorist specializing in Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. They co-host the Positive Disintegration, cosmic cheer squad, and PDA: Resistance and Resilience podcasts, and are the founding president of the Dąbrowski Center and co-creator of the Positive Disintegration Network. Chris brings lived experience and a deep commitment to reframing neurodivergence through a developmental and relational lens.
Emma Nicholson (she/her) is a neurodivergent Australian Senior Business Analyst, creative and advocate, identifying as gifted, Dyscalculic, with all five overexcitabilities (psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional), as well as bisexual and Heathen. She co-hosts the Positive Disintegration Podcast and serves as Vice President of the Dąbrowski Center. She is driven by an unkillable passion to demystify positive disintegration and share hard-won truths to help others feel seen and supported.
Bee Mayhew (she/her) is a multiply neurodivergent (late-identified AuDHD, former gifted kid) writer, narrative collaborator, and communication coordinator for PDN Media. She co-hosts cosmic cheer squad podcast and has a background as a hospitality specialist and business owner. Bee’s work centers on collective narrative-building and neurodivergent storytelling through activist, community-rooted practice.
Sheldon Gay (he/him) is a Black Gifted speaker and podcast host of I Must Be BUG'N (Black Underrepresented/Unidentified Gifted and otherwise Neurodivergent). Sheldon is guided by the belief that learning to deeply and wholly Love oneSelf, cape and kryptonite, is the path to finding, creating, and maintaining Love everywhere we go.
Marni Kammersell (she/her) is an American late-identified neurodivergent (Autistic, ADHD, PDA, gifted) parent of neurodivergent children. She is an educator, researcher, writer, and consultant, and co-hosts the PDA: Resistance and Resilience podcast. Marni is dedicated to honoring neurodivergent experience through relational, self-directed, and nervous-system-informed knowledge practices.
Teena Mogler (she/her) is an Australian AuDHD social worker, researcher, educator, and advocate, as well as co-host of the Divergent Dialogues podcast. As a mother to neurodivergent children, Teena is passionate about amplifying neurodivergent voices and disrupting epistemic injustice through lived experience-led, neuroaffirming, and critically reflexive knowledge practices.