☆ Storytelling as Resistance and Epistemic Justice

At Alice’s Wonderland, storytelling is at the heart of everything we do. It’s not just a way to share experiences—it’s a way to connect, challenge, and create belonging in systems that were never designed with us in mind.

We believe in the power of stories and storytelling to reframe, reclaim, and reimagine the world—especially for those whose voices have historically been misread, misunderstood, or marginalised. As Melanie Yergeau (2018) reminds us, reclaiming narrative is an act of epistemic justice, empowering neurodivergent people to author their own experiences rather than being objects of others’ stories.

“To author oneself, to claim narrative authority, is to contest who has the right to shape our realities.” — Yergeau, 2018, p. 6

Storytelling is more than personal expression. It is a form of resistance: a way of making visible what systems and institutional narratives erase and silence. By authoring our own narratives, we assert our humanity against medicalised and pathologised interpretations of our minds, bodies, and identities.

“Narrative is how we assert our humanity against medicalised and pathologised readings of our minds and bodies.” — Yergeau, 2018, p. 23

We centre non-normative storytelling not as an alternative—but as an essential narrative form. Looping, scripting, silence, metaphor, poetic logic—these are not flaws in expression, but forms of autistic brilliance. They resist literary and diagnostic conformity alike.

Narrative Disobedience, as articulated by Orme (2010), is a practice we actively apply and extend within Alice’s Wonderland to explore neurodivergent storytelling as resistance. Alongside this, we develop the concepts of Structural Empathy Failure, Neurokinship, and the Narrative Ecosystem as original frameworks of Alice’s Wonderland—tools for reimagining how story functions as justice, kinship, and cultural survival.

This act of narrative reclamation is fundamentally about epistemic justice—about asserting our authority to define our lived realities on our own terms. A neuroaffirmative practice that values inner worlds, lived truths, and imaginative possibility.

☆ Storytelling as Kinship and Connection

At Alice’s Wonderland, storytelling is not only resistance—it is relationship. It allows us to recognise ourselves and each other, to create neurokinship across divergent lives and experiences. Following Yergeau’s framing of narrative as epistemic justice, we also understand it as  neurokinship— a form of cultural belonging, emotional resonance, and mutual recognition within the neurodivergent community - a way of finding one another in a world that often isolates us.

While the notion of 'Neurokin' has emerged within neurodiversity advocacy, the concept of Neurokinship as articulated by Alice’s Wonderland explicitly extends and deepens this idea, emphasising relational epistemologies, solidarity, and cultural reclamation.

We tell stories not only to speak back to systems, but to speak toward each other. To build a shared language of resonance. To remind ourselves that our experiences are not anomalies—they are echoes of each another

☆ Story as Cultural Formation

The role of storytelling in shaping autistic community, culture, and solidarity is well documented. As Kapp (2020) illustrates in Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement, storytelling has played a central role in shaping autistic culture—not just for visibility, but for collective identity.

“Autistic people have created culture through sharing experiences. Storytelling has been a mode of both solidarity and resistance.”
— Kapp, 2020, p. 13

This storytelling does not need to follow normative or conventional arcs. It may be poetic, fragmentary, looped, sensory-rich, or nonlinear.

These forms are not limitations—they are forms of autistic brilliance. They resist literary conformity just as our lives resist diagnostic containment.

At Alice’s Wonderland, we celebrate these stories not as case studies, but as conceptual contributions. They are not simply accounts of experience, but architectures of thought—ways of thinking with the world, not just about it.

☆ Storytelling as Community-Making and Collective Belonging

Drawing on the work of Yergeau (2018), Kapp (2020), and neurodivergent collectives, we understand storytelling not only as resistance, but as a way of finding each other. Stories act as bridges—creating emotional connection, cultural memory, and what Yergeau frames as epistemic kinship.

Neurodivergent storytelling doesn’t need to follow conventional arcs. It may be looping, sensory, poetic, or fragmentary. These forms are not limitations—they are expressions of autistic brilliance. As Kapp writes, autistic culture is shaped through shared narrative, where storytelling becomes both solidarity and community.

At Alice’s Wonderland, we honour these stories not as testimony alone, but as the architecture of belonging.

☆ Narrative Ecosystem

This is more than a blog. It is a narrative ecosystem: a layered space for rethinking systems, identity, and belonging through neurodivergent storytelling. It is an archive in motion, shaped by wonder, grief, rebellion, and reimagining. As the platform evolves, it will continue to amplify narratives that speak truth to power and imagination to systems.

Whether rooted in rage, reflection, theory, or wonder, each story contributes to a broader narrative kinship and shared cultural fabric—one that centres lived experience as truth, and truth as transformation.

This ecosystem spans across three storytelling constellations grouped into three interconnected pathways — each offering a different lens into the neurodivergent experience and the systems and structural forces that shape us. This series spans both our ND Voices and Essays collections—exploring storytelling as resistance, as kinship, and as epistemic justice.

Borrowing from media studies’ concept of Narrative Ecosystems (see Cambridge, 2023), Alice’s Wonderland uniquely applies and extends this framework to neurodivergent storytelling, extending it into a justice-oriented model of cultural formation, narrative solidarity, and epistemic survival

☆ Why Storytelling?

In a world built on compliance, metrics, and misrecognition, storytelling brings us back to human connection. It gives form to silence, voice to truth, and shape to the futures we imagine.

At Alice’s Wonderland, we believe storytelling is the radical act of being known on our own terms—and of finding one another in the telling.

➽ We invite you to read, feel, reflect, and tell your story