Alice’s Wonderland © 2025

✩ Alice’s Wonderland Concepts ✩

“Narrative disobedience is the refusal of imposed narrative norms.” — Jennifer Orme (2011)

Original Frameworks and Extensions of Neurodivergent Theory

Alice’s Wonderland is not only a space for exploring established ideas—it is also a site of conceptual creation. Drawing from lived experience, critical scholarship, and imaginative re-framing, we have developed a series of frameworks that either originate here or are extended through Wonderland’s lens.

These concepts name what has too often gone unnamed: systemic failures of empathy, the cultural kinship of divergent lives, and the narrative webs that sustain resistance and belonging. Some are wholly original to Wonderland, while others are adapted from existing theories but transformed through a neurodivergent, justice-centred lens.

Original Concepts

✩ Structural Empathy Failure

✩ Origin: Alice’s Wonderland (2024).

✩ What it is: Extends Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem beyond interpersonal dynamics into systemic and institutional contexts.

✩ Definition: Structural Empathy Failure describes the systemic inability of institutions—schools, healthcare, social care, justice systems—to engage empathically and relationally across diverse neurotypes. Bureaucratic timelines, procedural rigidity, and deficit logics create environments where empathy is structurally inhibited.

✩ Why it matters: This framework shifts blame away from individuals and names systemic misrecognition as the true source of exclusion. It frames institutional harm as a failure of systems, not people.

✩ Neurokinship

✩ Origin: Alice’s Wonderland (2024).

✩ What it is: Builds from loose uses of “neurokin” in advocacy but articulates Neurokinship as a full conceptual framework.

✩ Definition: Neurokinship is a form of cultural belonging, emotional resonance, and mutual recognition within neurodivergent communities. Through storytelling and shared narrative recognition, we discover one another and form kin-like bonds that resist isolation.

✩ Why it matters: Neurokinship reframes community not just as advocacy but as relational epistemology—a way of knowing each other and ourselves through story, resonance, and shared survival.

Extended & Reframed Concepts

✩ Narrative Disobedience

✩ Origin: Jennifer Orme (2010), in literary studies.

✩ Wonderland extension: At Alice’s Wonderland, we apply Narrative Disobedience to neurodivergent storytelling.

✩ Definition: Narrative Disobedience is the deliberate refusal of imposed narrative norms—whether clinical case notes, deficit-based life stories, or linear arcs demanded by institutions. It honours looping, poetic, and fragmented forms of storytelling as legitimate, resistant, and brilliant.

✩ Why it matters: In Wonderland, Narrative Disobedience becomes a tool of epistemic justice and survival. It resists erasure and asserts divergent lives as worthy of telling on their own terms.

✩ Narrative Ecosystem

✩ Origin: Media studies (Cambridge, 2023), where the term describes webs of digital/media storytelling.

✩ Wonderland extension: We adapt this into a neurodivergent cultural framework, treating storytelling as a living ecosystem of resistance, kinship, and imagination.

✩ Definition: A Narrative Ecosystem is the cultural web of stories that sustains neurodivergent communities. It is relational, dynamic, and layered—made of testimony, analysis, poetic fragments, and collective memory.

✩ Why it matters: Wonderland positions its entire platform as a narrative ecosystem: an evolving archive of truth, resonance, and imaginative resistance.

✩ Wonderland as Neurodivergent World

✩ Origin: Luke Beardon’s Autopia (2017), itself adapted from “Utopia.”

✩ Wonderland extension: While Beardon imagined optimal autistic environments, Wonderland expands the frame into a broader neurodivergent world—playful, resistant, relational, and justice-centred.

✩ Definition: Wonderland envisions a divergent world built not on compliance but on curiosity, imagination, and double empathy. It functions both as critique (of systems that fail) and as possibility (a blueprint for what could be).

✩ Why it matters: By extending Autopia into Wonderland, we propose not just safe spaces but transformative worlds, where difference is generative and justice is embedded.

✩ Misfitting

✩ Origin: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2011), in disability studies, where misfitting describes the relational mismatch between body/mind and environment: exclusion occurs when the world fails to fit us.

✩ Wonderland extension: At Alice’s Wonderland, we reclaim misfitting as a neurodivergent practice of resistance and belonging—similar to the reclamation of queer and crip.

✩ Definition: Misfitting is both condition and refusal: it names the relational mismatch created by neuronormative systems and the joyful embrace of absurdity, weirdness, and “madness” as cultural belonging. To misfit is to expose the nonsense of imposed norms and to celebrate difference as generative.

✩ Why it matters: In Wonderland, misfitting is a form of playful resistance. It disrupts conformity, reframes stigma as solidarity, and aligns with Alice’s own encounters with nonsense and the absurd. To misfit is not failure—it is freedom, a way of imagining belonging beyond the demand to “fit.”

Why These Concepts Matter

Together, these concepts mark Alice’s Wonderland as both a creative platform and a conceptual space. They:

✩ Provide new language for systemic failures (Structural Empathy Failure).

✩ Ground belonging in relational culture (Neurokinship).

✩ Extend existing theories into justice-centred applications (Narrative Disobedience, Narrative Ecosystem, Wonderland).

Naming and claiming these concepts matters because they are not simply academic exercises—they are lived truths given form. They ensure that Wonderland is not only a place of storytelling but also a site of conceptual authorship, reshaping how we imagine neurodivergent futures.

➽ This entry is part of the Key Concepts series at Alice’s Wonderland, exploring the frameworks that shape how we think, connect, and create. If you’d like to contribute your own reflections or join the conversation, we’d love to hear from you.