Beyond the Normative Human is an artistic research PhD that investigates the political and aesthetic potential of neurological difference.

This project interrogates the pathologisation of neurodivergent modes of sensing, moving, and knowing. Rather than positioning neurological difference as deficit or disorder, the project explores how institutional and medical frameworks stabilize certain relational patterns as normative, and how these stabilizations might be unsettled to foreground difference as generative variation.

Beyond the Normative Human is an artistic research inquiry into how neurotypical regimes of language, sensing, moving, and knowing are institutionally stabilized as normative measures of the human. The project works to unsettle these regimes from within the field of experience itself, activating alternative relational ecologies that exceed and reconfigure what counts as “human.”

Drawing on process-relational philosophy, particularly the work of Erin Manning the project positions artistic practice as a site of philosophical inquiry — a field where normative patterns of perception and social organization can be unsettled from within. Here, difference is not something to be corrected but a minor force capable of modulating the social body and revealing alternative relational ecologies.

Methodologically, the PhD is grounded in autoethnographic research emerging from my lived relation with my autistic son. This relational methodology does not treat autism as an object of study, but as a shared field of experience that reshapes perception, temporality, communication, and embodiment. Through artistic experiments, situated reflection, and embodied documentation, the project explores how neurodivergent attunements challenge neurotypical choreographies of language, attention, and social coherence.

By weaving together artistic practice, critical theory, and lived relational experience, the research asks: What becomes possible when neurological difference is approached not as pathology, but as a political and aesthetic force capable of transforming how the social body organizes itself?