Oughtism is a seminar series which expands the Blackwood Gallery’s 2025­–26 exploration of neurodivergent doing, feeling and being, and sets out to conjure linguistic and embodied possibilities for being that resist neurotypical logic. The title is inspired by Báyò Akómoláfe, who writes:

Oughtism is my name for the ways we are trained, habituated, conditioned, and rewarded to think along dominant lines of production. How we 'ought' to behave… In these moments of wars, angry lines, and angrier flames, may we be visited by outstretched arms and offending requests to toss away the crippling fixation with neurotypical goals. And may we find the minor gesture lurking between the pieces, in breath-snatching shapes that flash up through the blinding obvious. [1]

The Oughtism symposium asks: what does it mean to trust one’s own movement, feeling, and perception, when dominant narratives privilege certain ways of sensing, knowing, and being?

Oughtism sits in response to the Blackwood exhibition STIM CINEMA, and will unfold through a series of lectures, film screenings, experiential learning exercises, and collaborative workshops.

We begin on Thursday, February 5 with a screening of The Stimming Pool, an experimental—at times fantastical—hybrid feature film, co-created by the Neurocultures Collective, a group of five neurodiverse artists (Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Sam Chown-Ahern, Robin Elliot-Knowles, Lucy Walker) and Steven Eastwood, who invite you into a neurodiverse world within the undulating logic of neurotypical environments. The screening will be followed by a conversation with collective members Georgia Bradburn & Sam Chown Ahern, and Steven Eastwood on their unique, accessible film production methods, facilitated by Chris Gehman.

The symposium continues the next day with Janet Harbord who will give a talk on her new book Autism and The Empathy Epidemic which digs up and examines an earlier definition of 'empathy', and argues that autism, like cinema, models an ethical apprehension of the more-than-human world. M. Remi Yergeau will give a talk on perseveration (a bodymind’s compulsion to ruminate and rehearse) and the potential it holds for providing an unruly, indecorous framework for creativity and cripping the world. We will then take an out-loud reading tour of Spreads from the Multiverse, a 4-part lightbox installation on the UTM campus presenting select works from the Multiverse, a literary series featuring a chorus of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, nonspeaking, and disabled cultures. The day will conclude with a co-creation as stimming workshop with Neurocultures Collective members Georgia Bradburn & Sam Chown Ahern, and Steven Eastwood, to focus on liberated methods of artmaking that provide opportunities for neurodivergent agency and sensory joy. 

On February 7, Chris Martin will give a talk on autistic languaging as a uniquely restorative force, a wild ecosystem of expression that allows words to replenish and reroot themselves, and will conclude by engaging us in some of our own collective languaging. Leon J. Hilton will give a talk on cartographic reclamation and neurodivergent ways of inhabiting a more capacious and imaginative world which is at the centre of his new book Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance. Aby Watson will conclude Oughtism with a stimprovisation workshop and jam, a sensory-seeking improvisation through practices of movement (stimdance), object (stimplements), and voice (sensinging). Along the way we’ll tour STIM CINEMA in the Blackwood’s galleries, explore the UTM campus, and nourish our bodies and minds.

All events will prioritise access and inclusion, and quiet spaces for reflection and processing will be made available.

[1] Báyò Akómoláfe, “Oughtism,” May 7, 2024, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/oughtism.