Neuroinclusion isn’t one size fits all. For most of us embedded in neurodivergent circles, that feels obvious. We advocate for the idea that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. How autistic folks navigate the world is different by virtue of not being a monolith.
But there’s a part of this conversation that feels underrepresented. Neuroinclusion through a cross-cultural lens. How colonial history shapes a society’s relationship to difference in general, and how that plays out specifically within neurodivergent contexts.
Is this short article going to give you all the answers and insights you need to flawlessly approach cross-cultural neuroinclusive practice? Sadly, no. But it is a reflection on lessons learned and candid conversations that came out of my professional placement with the Institute of Neurodiversity Singapore, hosted by Neuropower World.
Back story, I’m the founder of The Spiky Bureau, a boutique neurodivergent consulting agency in Melbourne. Earlier this year I attended a session at my coworking space about a professional placement program connected to the Australian government’s Southeast Asia 2040 strategy. It detailed the imperative for building future skills and economic connection in the region. Always eager for a learning opportunity, I made the case that neuroinclusion was central to the success of the strategy itself, especially in their priority industries like tech and cyber security.
Cognitive diversity, inclusive workplaces, and the ability to attract and retain a wide range of talent aren’t nice-to-haves. If we continue to shape the workforce without them? Well, to be quite frank, we ought to be ready to watch our organisations flop.
My application went in.
The case was accepted.
To participate I needed to find a host organisation willing to take me on, and that’s when I took the punt and introduced myself to Hazleen Ahmad, founder of Neuropower World and CEO of ION Singapore and Farzana Mohsin, Executive Director of ION Singapore.
What I didn’t fully anticipate was how much the placement would shift my thinking, not about neuroinclusion itself, but about the assumptions I’d arrived with.
I work in Australia. I’ve built my consultancy in an Australian context, informed by Australian regulation, workplace culture, and an advocacy landscape, that has its own particular history and momentum. People and inclusion are genuine special interests of mine, so I knew, in a broad sense, that what neuroinclusion and neurodiversity landscapes look like wasn’t universal. But knowing something as a broad concept and sitting across the table from folks who are approaching this work from a completely different cultural and political starting point are two different experiences.
Singapore’s relationship to neurodivergence is shaped by different forces than Australia’s, but that doesn’t mean Australia has a clean starting point either. Colonial history has a lasting legacy in both contexts, just differently.
In Australia, that history is inseparable from how difference gets read, named, and responded to. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, the consequences are still unfolding in real time with biases in the medical system that can inhibit accurate diagnoses. The clinical infrastructure was not designed with these communities in mind, and many of the inequities that persist today reflect that history. So when we talk about neuroinclusion in an Australian context, we are talking about a landscape where some people have always been pathologised and others have never been assessed, and both of those things trace back to the same root.
Singapore’s colonial history is its own and layered on top of it is something particular to how the country was built. With limited natural resources, Singapore has long invested in its people as its greatest asset. That emphasis on education, achievement and economic resilience has become a defining part of the nation’s story. Through that lens, it’s easier to understand how societal expectations around performance and conformity have evolved – not simply as cultural traits, but as responses to the realities of nation-building.
Through that lens, we can better contextualise where societal perceptions and acceptance of difference come from. The stigma attached to difference, particularly neurodivergence, becomes a question of perception, ability and deficit against this backdrop shaped by history.
This isn’t all bad, this is an exciting time to take back the narrative. ION Singapore is actively building awareness, and the people I spent time with, board members, academics, people coming from commercial and education backgrounds, were sitting with these complexities deliberately. They weren’t waiting for an outside framework to arrive. They were working out what neuroinclusion actually looks like when you build it honestly from within your own context. We had conversations about accepting difference being akin to the bravery to strive for difference in pursuit of independence. And that feels so, so powerful.
So, as tempting as it can be, I think the lesson here is to not ask comparative questions around which countries are ‘further along’ or what they did. Much bolder and more meaningful questions would be:
- What does culturally appropriate neuroinclusion actually require of us as practitioners?
- How do we advocate for inclusion that respects the cultural frameworks people live inside, including how respect is expressed, how trust is built, and how difference is understood in a given community?
Context is everything – we know that. Historical context is no different. It’s the foundations of understanding perspectives, stigmas and perhaps why some of our assumed neuroinclusive practice falls short.
Permission isn’t enough. Social permission to stim, stand, or move isn’t the same as cultural permission. You can say “feel free to stand at the back” and still have a room where nobody does it, because the culture says sitting down is respect. So what do you have to do instead? That’s the harder question, and it’s one I don’t think most neuroinclusion frameworks have seriously grappled with yet.
I don’t think the answer is that cross-cultural neuroinclusive practice is impossible. I think the answer is that it requires a different kind of humility that suggests “what I know was built somewhere specific, and that matters”. This really is a reflection on meeting people where they are. Not where you expected them to be. That’s actually the whole point of neuroinclusion when you pull it right back.
My most sincere thanks to the ION Singapore network for so warmly welcoming me this month, for such valuable insight and deeply enriching conversations.