Krysia 
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Autism and Theology podcast. I'm Krysia and it's great that you've joined us this week. The podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and Theology, sharing relevant resources and promoting ways that help faith and non-faith communities enable autistic people to flourish. If you'd like to access the transcript for this episode, it can be found in the link in the show notes. And today on CATChat, we're going to be discussing the most recent conference that came out of CAT, the Faith on the Margins, engaging with non-speaking and black autistic Christians. And with me today I have Ian and Armud. So welcome both and I wanted almost to start our conversation because we all come from similar, but different places in regards to the topic. Why we think the topic of the conference was really important, I guess, and I'll open the floor to both of you.

Ian 
Sure, I don't mind starting. As a cis, white, autistic, heterosexual male, I feel like my perspective is fairly well represented in the autistic literature, right? Which is not to say that I don't have anything to say or that I can't contribute to the conversation or anything like that, but we have a fairly good bead on what autism looks like and the autistic experience for white males, right? And anytime you have a group that isn't that doesn't line up with that, the experience is a little bit different and it is less well represented in literature and it's less well characterized and it's less well understood.
And so also obviously I'm a I'm speaking as part of this podcast. So that's another dimension to this is non speaking autistics. So for me. It's just it's. It's so easy to forget in the literature that I mean as often as we say, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. We still tend to gravitate towards the stereotypes and the and the understandings that are based off of original descriptions of autistic people that are based on observation of white male children, right? And so hearing different perspectives, hearing from people who have different experiences is vitally important to a better understand of what autism actually means and what autistic experience actually is. It's, you know, one of the ways that I think about this is we have a fourfold gospel witness, right? And each of those gospels paints a different portrait of Christ in the hopes that. By seeing all four different portraits, we somehow get a little bit closer to the truth that lies behind each of them. And the same, I think, is true of autistic experience. The more it's described from different perspectives, the more portraits we paint for people of autistic experience, the better our understanding of what it actually means.
Means to be artistic actually ends U.

Armud
Yeah, and for myself, similarly white male, somewhat older than Ian, but coming to it from a lifetime in heavy industry, and being late diagnosed. Just finding it the whole thing of how autism manifests for different people and in different ways. Very interesting just to being able to hear other people's perspectives on various topics.
And for me, one of the interesting words which I came across and recognised was alexithymia, which is something that I recognise in myself, but it was good to hear that also brought to the table.

Krysia  
Definitely and I think. As somebody who isn't non-speaking but knows people who do experience times where they describe themselves as semi-speaking, and also knowing autistic people who are from ethnic minority backgrounds as well. I think I really appreciate how the conference paid attention to the different intersecting experiences people had, and the kind of context around those experiences, because although I don't get taken seriously as a white youngish autistic person, who is very bendy and clearly not just autistic, is multiply neurodivergent. I know that I get taken more seriously in some senses than some of the people the conference actually was talking with as well. So for example, I went down to urgent care at the weekend because I got a rusty fingernail scraped on my thumb because I thought it'd be really sensible to pick up an old kitchen unit that was in our front garden without gloves on. Really sensible. But the minute I because I can communicate sort of at, you know, urgent care down the road and I was able to say I'm autistic, I'm not very good at waiting. I was able to advocate for my needs and be kind of seen as I fitted that stereotype of that autistic person might be a little bit better than perhaps some of the people who might not be taken so seriously. And I think for me, when we talk about what it means to be autistic, I guess bouncing off both Ian and Armud, we need to understand all the different facets and ways that what being autistic means in a way, and I guess it would also be really useful as we're all dotted in very different geographic locations. How we found the conference as well might be really useful to reflect on.

Armud
Well, I was able to be part of the conference for most of the first two days, the third day. By the end of the second day, I was just getting fairly tired and just phased out with spending so much time looking at a screen and trying to pay attention to what was going on, but I found the variety of of speakers and the variety of perspectives very helpful and just the opening it to the experience of other faiths and just understanding a bit about how their experience of expressing faith in in the context of autism and how that was brought a richness to the conversation, which I hadn't come across before and was very, very helpful. And that was obviously followed up on the on the third day with a lot of more in-depth experience from the from the black community and they're bringing their experience. And also just something as.
Small as, yeah, the African experience is not uniform across the country. So the Malawi experience and the Nigerian experience are not necessarily identical. And yes, that was a salutary corrective in my mind.

Ian
Yeah, I'll I confess I am not much of a conference goer as a general rule. I tend not to seek them out because sometimes I find them exhausting, but I do pay attention to sort of what's going on. And what I what I really appreciated about this conference was that it really was presenting a series of different perspectives that I don't think you can really find anywhere else. That don't seem to be commonly represented in other conferences or in in a lot of other venues, at least that are well publicized or that are that are that I've managed to hear about. So I really appreciated just a 
significant depth and breadth of experience that was that was represented, as Armud said, that the variety of different religious experiences, it's just, it's just really.
It's really exciting to see something that I don't think is out there anywhere else, or at least that I have not come across, right? And maybe that's my I'll freely admit that that might be my failing, but.

Armud   
Mm.

Ian
It seemed like this was really presenting something that that I haven't seen a lot of other places.

Krysia 
Definitely. And I think the thing I found about this conference  - in the last CAT conference back in 2019, so I really like how a lot of it is online or that the whole thing was online. So it takes away that geographic barrier but also allows space for you to be able to do what your body needs to do and your brain needs to do, which I really appreciate because although I do like a good in-person conference because I have to say I do like conference food and I like kind of hotel breakfasts. I like being able to meet people. Sometimes I don't always see I do. I find them particularly exhausting and I do tend not to go to everything and really, really strictly pace myself. And the thing I deeply appreciated for this conference was not only the breadth, the content, but also the way that we could engage in a way that's best for us. We've all got very different needs. And even if we had an even more diverse group of people reflecting on the conference, I'm sure that actually if people need to lay down and listen to it, or they want to listen in a podcast, whether they're doing the gardening because they really struggle to sit still for long periods of time, or they're really, really visual and they want to see what's going on, it allows for that.
Real differentiation of how people choose to do conferences, which I think is a real strength of what CAT has done, especially where we've kept really strictly to time as well. So we know if you sign on at 2:00, someone else is going to be talking, whereas I think sometimes in person conferences. Sometimes people kind of overrun and then they natter and then I get really anxious because I'm like I want to go for dinner. And so I think that is a real strength of not only the breadth and the depth what was going on, but also the place and space of it as well. Were there any particular kind of papers or presentations or one thing we'd like listeners to know that kind of took away from what we attended of the conference?

Ian
This is this is kind of specific to my experience and and my background, but I really appreciated one of the short paper sessions was called Profaning the Sanctuary Autism and the Often Blocked Paths to Ministry. And I as an autistic Episcopal clergy person, I think and have thought a lot serve on my Diocesan Commission on Ministry, which is the body that sort of helps people discern and figure out who we send to seminary and who is going to be ordained and that sort of thing. So I have thought a lot about systemic barriers to ordination around autism and neurotypical expectations of clergy and that sort of thing, because we tend to have these unspoken assumptions about what a clergy person looks like and acts like and how they relate to people. And so I have seen in several different processes, not saying necessarily in the process that I'm a part of, but in other processes at least, I have seen ways in which people are told you won't be a successful clergy person because.
As blank and the blank is really naming something that is an autistic characteristic or autistic behavior or autistic way of being. And so I just, I think it's always worth thinking about. This is again, this is based on my perspective thinking from church leadership perspective. Thinking from ordained ministry perspective, thinking about those barriers to church leadership that apply because of the the neurotypical assumptions, the neuronormative assumptions we have around what clergy ought to look like. Now that was just dealing with neurotypical versus autistic and we have layers and layers upon that. When you get into intersectionality, it just it becomes more and more barriers to church leadership. So I think that's something that is worth. Continuing to think about is not just what is the experience of different Christians, but are we really or different autistics, but are we really making space for them to survive, to thrive, to be in leadership positions? I think that's a really important part of our work.

Armud
Yes, you know, found the that challenge to the whole thing of kind of what does a clergy person have to do very interesting. I mean one of the speakers was talking about kind of how they. We're very confident in being able to preach, but the whole shaking hands afterwards and the coffee hour is just absolute torture for them and kind of why is it? An implicit requirement of being a clergy person that you have to attend coffee sessions and you have to stand and shake hands with everyone as they come out of the church. I mean, there was also the challenge that was raised about.
Are we fitting people to the job? Why not fit the job to the person? And I thought that was a very salutary challenge, obviously a difficult one for an organization to implement bots. Why? Why do we have one-size-fits-all?

Krysia 
And I guess for me the kind of building on the one-size-fits-all, I really appreciated what a strong, the really strong critical nature of the first day with both papers from Lizzy Peach and Anna Bishop and also the panel that I chaired with Sofia Farzana, Sofia Rehman and Marion McLaughlin, we spoke a lot obviously about different practices and barriers and also joys, which I think is really important as well, but all of them had quite a strong undertone of speaking back to some of the narratives that have been set by people who don't have the relevant lived experience. And I think it almost sets it up for a lot of the other stuff that you both mentioned really, really strongly. And I think sometimes I go to conferences and I come - kind of walk away and go, I don't know, but actually I walked away quite energized thinking actually this is a kind of this really good meaning making and sense making here, which I think people both inside and outside of academia can take on board. So I found that really, really - really kind of warming in a way and I guess almost it speaks to the faith on the margins thing quite broadly as well, which obviously was the title of the whole title, kind of whole title of conference. And access denied as well, where we're saying, well, you can't, you don't belong here because actually kind of that speaking back. So it set it up really, really, really nicely.


Armud
I thought it was good that we had the Talking Mats presentation and the admission by one of the co-presenters that when they were designing the symbols to go with the Talking Mats thing the symbol for prayer was forgotten and it's like, OK, yeah, but just being able to see that presentation where a non speaking person was communicating and seeing how that went, that was very insightful for me as obviously a speaker, just to understand a bit more about how non-speakers can communicate and how that what that actually looks like.

Krysia 
We also hope that you really enjoyed the conference too. Parts of the conference were recorded and will be up on the CAT YouTube channel when they've been edited and we'll be able to signpost you to them when they're up. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. If you have any questions, you can message us
@AutismTheology on Blue Sky or Instagram. Or you can send us an e-mail at CAT@abdn.ac.uk. Even if it's just to say hi, we'd love to hear from you.