Finding Neurodivergent Community in Computing Education

Abstract

For computing to serve humanity, all individuals must be able to feel safe within computing. While prior work has surfaced how hegemonic racial and gendered expectations manifest in computing, neurodivergent identities have received far less attention. Existing neurodiversity narratives look to deconstruct mechanisms that privilege certain ways of thinking and being over others, but those narratives are scarce within computing. Critically, narratives are constructed in dialogue with community, and prior SIGCSE conferences have largely lacked official support for this construction, relegating those conversations to corners and edges within the conference space. This BoF continues work from last SIGCSE in supporting the construction of narratives that center neurodivergent identities and creating neurodivergent communities. We have three goals for this space: 1) cultivate community around an "invisible" identity for which public disclosure is often problematic, 2) give an explicit space for folks to "unmask" within a broader conference where masking is typically expected, and 3) utilize existing work to create connections around more specific aspects of neurodivergence.