Belonging Beyond the Norm: Autism as a Source of Ethical and Political Potential in Democratic Education

This paper offers a reconceptualisation of educational belonging by engaging autism not as a clinical category but as an epistemological and ethical-political lens. It examines how democratic education can respond to neurodivergent experience if it is to fulfil its emancipatory promise. Drawing on G. E. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, and Deva Woodly, the argument exposes how liberal-democratic ideals of participation rely on normative expectations of communication, autonomy, and rational self-expression. Autistic pupils are thereby confined to tokenistic forms of inclusion: presence without voice and participation without recognition. Extending Woodly's notion of the contextual individual, participation is conceptualised as relational and embodied rather than procedural. The paper introduces the concept of autistic flourishing: a vision of meaningful life that resists productivity, linear development, and normative sociality. Democratic belonging is understood as resting on relationality, vulnerability, and embodied presence. Autistic perspectives thus become generative resources for reimagining educational institutions as spaces of radical belonging, in which difference functions as a condition of democracy itself.