A Window Into an Evolving Dialogue About the Neurodiversity Movement and Music Therapy: Conversations Between Music Therapy Students, Practitioners, Educators and Researchers Around the Globe and Across the Spectrum of Neurodiversity

As a collective of neurodivergent and neurotypical music therapists socially located in multiple spaces, we have been developing our understanding of the neurodiversity movement and its relevance to music therapy (Thompson et al., 2019; Elefant et al., 2020; Pickard et al., 2020). Building on the increasing attention and awareness this topic has received (Gottschewski, 2020; Davies, 2020; Leza, 2020; Pickard, 2020), we seek to broaden our understanding through collaboration and co-production with other neurodivergent music therapy practitioners. We highly value standpoint epistemology (Kapp, 2019) which acknowledges the expertise of those with lived experience; with this notion we invite readers to join us in our commitment to understanding this topic and its centrality to social justice discussions in music therapy.

This article will briefly encapsulate our engagement with the Neurodiversity Movement in relation to music therapy to date, before embarking on a series of dialogues with collaborative partners: music therapy students and clinicians at different stages of their careers, with different worldviews and experiences of neurodiversity. These dialogues will be facilitated through diverse media in recognition of the range of communication preferences and modes of engagement prevalent in the group. The dialogues will be captured and transcribed with extracts of significance presented and annotated throughout the article. It is proposed that this living engagement will widen the membership, reach, accessibility and relevance of our collective.

Through this article, which will include a combination of theoretical context, extracts of dialogue between various international contributors, annotation and synthesis, we hope to present a transparent insight into our learning process. Our aspiration is that the diverse authorship will enable readers from different countries, career stages, theoretical orientations and worldviews to relate to and engage with the potential of the Neurodiversity Movement and to apply this learning to their own practices.