Neuroinclusive Arts Education: Epistemic Justice, Neurodiversity and Ecologies of Care

This paper examines neuroinclusive arts education as a critical-creative pedagogical practice grounded in three interconnected frameworks: epistemic justice, the neurodiversity paradigm and care ethics. Moving beyond accommodation-based approaches that individualise neurodivergence, the paper argues for a structural and political reframing of arts education as an ecology of relations, practices and interpretive resources. Drawing on theories of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, it demonstrates how dominant pedagogical norms in higher arts education privilege neurotypical, white, Western and verbally fluent modes of knowing, thereby marginalising neurodivergent students and constraining both recognition and self-understanding. The neurodiversity paradigm is mobilised to reconceptualise creativity not as an exceptional trait or individual capacity, but as a relational and ecological process that emerges through cognitive variation, sensory experience, temporal rhythms and institutional conditions. Care ethics further extends this analysis by framing care as an epistemic and political responsibility that reshapes sensory, relational and communicative norms in educational environments. The paper is grounded through a case study of Iets Eten (‘Let’s Eat’), a neurodivergent-led community within a university of the arts, which illustrates both the possibilities and tensions of care-based, epistemically just practices. Taken together, the paper proposes neuroinclusive arts education as an ongoing process of institutional transformation aimed at cultivating plural ways of knowing, creating and belonging.