In collaboration with My Life, My Decisions, we recently held a community orientated conference Neurodivergence, Identity & Self-Determination: Enhancing Understanding and Connections at UoW. In this event we brought together autistic and neurodivergent individuals, parents, professionals, community business partners, educators, students and researchers in one space over two days to share lived experiences and map a shared vision forward that connects all of us.

I completed my M.A. in philosophy with a specialization in phenomenology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark under the supervision of Prof. Dan Zahavi.

My doctoral thesis, New Developments in Enactive Social Cognition, was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Glenda Satne, Dr. Michael Kirchhoff, and Prof. Shaun Gallagher. The thesis provides new developments for the enactive project of investigating and explaining social cognition. The thesis utilizes two approaches to achieve this goal. First, it dialectally defends enactivism vis-a-vis the mindreading framework. It does this by both securing established enactive claims from criticism, and by developing new objections against mindreading. Second, the thesis offers new enactive interpretations of empirical developmental data and presents new ways of investigating three central areas of debate within the field of social cognition: the metaphysical basis of social cognitive processes, the false-belief test literature, and the concept of empathy in relation to therapeutic practices and autism.

I presented a commentary on Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s (2019) book The Mind-Body Politic at the American Philosophical Association central meeting in Chicago 2022. My commentary ‘Master Narratives: Embodying Ideology’ is under review as part of a special issue of the Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion to be published later this year.

In my most recent article published in Frontiers in Psychology, I advocate for a relational model of disability that adopts both a neurodiversity paradigm approach and Chapman’s ecological functional model. Recent developments in this area of research are working more towards utilising enactive and neurodiversity frameworks. This is a follow-up on work that I began in my PhD thesis.

I am also reviewer for the following journals: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Constructivist Foundations, Adaptive Behavior, Cogent Psychology, Philosophical Psychology, Imaging Science Journal, Autism Research, Critical Education, Current Psychiatry Research and Reviews and Diametros.

To stay up to date check out: Academia, Google Scholar, PhilPeople, and ResearchGate.

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which the University of Wollongong is built and where I am able to do my research. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first people of Australia. They have never ceded sovereignty, and remain strong in their enduring connection to land and culture.