Empowering Voices: Fostering Reflective Dialogue and Redefining Research Dynamics in Participatory Approaches With the Autistic Community

Within this brief report, the authors, who are mostly neurodivergent and a majority autistic, outline some of the challenges and historical failings of participatory research with the autistic community. There is an urgent need to explore creative ways to ensure that research engages with autistic people in an active, meaningful, and valuable way (Den Houting et al., 2021; Fletcher-Watson et al., 2019; Garfield & Yudell, 2019). The authors detail the process of using reflective dialogue to explore the participatory research group’s personal experiences of mental health at a university. The participatory group later presented their experiences at a webinar attended by more than 200 strategic and supporting staff from UK universities. The group found reflective dialogue to be useful in addressing many of the failings of participatory research with the autistic community, such as redressing power imbalances and finding it to be personally beneficial and validating. The authors detail how this might be implemented and argue that this approach has valuable applications within autism research and beyond and should be explored further.