Spaces of Relational Opacity – Participatory Sense-Making and the Ethics of Being With Autistic People

Introduction

We live in a world of diversity. We are all different from one another. Practitioners in education will come into regular contact with neurodivergent people, who have different ways of communicating. As a culture, we have limiting, pre-conceived ideas about neurodivergent people, and also about what constitutes meaningful or valid communication.

Epistemic norms privileging clarity, speed and interpretive control influence both our assumptions about what participation and social engagement should look like and, in turn, research and practice. Engagement is considered intelligible – and valid – when it mirrors familiar, neuronormative patterns and becomes questionable, or even invisible, when it takes unfamiliar forms. Although rarely acknowledged, this premise shapes how neurodivergent experiences are studied, interpreted and supported across education (Palikara et al. 2025), clinical practice (Doherty et al. 2022) and therapeutic work (De Jaegher 2023). It determines which forms of relational expression are readily valued and which require explanation, intervention or correction.

Autistic communicative styles make the limitations of such assumptions particularly salient. Research has revealed not an absence of social orientation (as was for a long time theorised – e.g. Chevallier et al. 2012) but the presence of perceptual, affective and expressive patterns that do not map neatly onto dominant expectations. Variations in timing, sensory focus, movement and affect are frequently pathologised rather than recognised as meaningful alternative modes of creating and navigating relational space (Delafield-Butt et al. 2020; Eigsti 2013). Enactive and embodied approaches are a crucial, neurodiversity-affirming counterpoint here, repositioning participation as a dynamic, co-creative process emerging from reciprocal engagement with shared environments, rather than as a matter of accurately inferring hidden mental states (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015; De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007).

This article draws on enactive cognitive science, phenomenology, disability studies and educational research, bringing these into dialogue because each illuminates a dimension of autistic interaction that the others cannot fully capture alone. It argues that expanding conventional communication categories is insufficient. What requires reconsideration are the ethical and epistemic boundaries that determine what counts as mutual understanding in the first place. Concepts such as participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007), embodied coordination, narrative movement (Delafield-Butt et al. 2020), Being With as a co-intentional relational stance (Grace 2025), as well as theories that reframe cross-neurotype communication as ruptures in mutuality (Bolis et al. 2017; Milton 2012), and a growing body of empirical research on embodiment (Eigsti 2013) show that meaning is co-constructed, or at times obstructed, by the specific relational and environmental conditions in which interactions unfold.

A shift of this kind invites practitioners to move away from correcting expressive differences and toward designing environments that support diverse embodied rhythms, and supporting communicators to become more sensitised to the communicative potential of non-speaking modes of interacting. Rather than enforcing normative clarity, such environments make space for relational opacity, enabling different temporalities, sensory orientations and expressive styles to participate in shared sense-making (see also Ware 2003). In educational settings, this means that participation cannot be limited to standardised markers such as hand-raising, eye contact or rapid verbal responses. Instead, classrooms, playgrounds and corridors become key sites where interactional expectations can either constrain or genuinely invite autistic ways of being.

Intelligibility, Normativity and the Epistemic Construction of Autistic Experience

Building on this framing, the scientific and clinical constructions of autistic experience can be seen as an epistemic project shaped by norms of intelligibility, that is, assumptions about which behaviours count as meaningful social engagement. Representational models that privilege neurotypical markers such as direct gaze, rapid turn-taking or verbal reciprocity (Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, and Lombardo 2013) risk conflating intelligibility with value. Autistic people’s embodied expressions are often misinterpreted as deficits rather than alternative relational logics (De Jaegher 2021; Reddy 2008). These interpretive habits naturalise one communicative template and obscure others, especially in educational and clinical settings, where divergent expressions are often labelled off-task or non-responsive despite signalling purposeful engagement (Nind and Hewett 2012).

A growing body of relational and enactive research challenges this deficit logic by reframing purported interactional difficulties as mismatches rather than impairments. Studies of embodied coordination show that autistic relational rhythms, such as distinctive timings, sensory orientations or movement-based expressions, form coherent patterns of engagement, even in contexts of profound disability (Delafield-Butt et al. 2020; Eigsti 2013; Heasman and Gillespie 2019). The double empathy problem further highlights that communicative breakdowns emerge from reciprocal differences in expectation and sense-making, not from autistic people (Fletcher-Watson and Crompton 2019; Milton 2012; 2014).

These insights have direct implications for practice. Research on classroom interaction shows that when adults adjust pacing, follow a student’s focus and recognise non-speech forms of communication, opportunities for participation and learning increase markedly (Caldwell 2008; Nind and Hewett 2012). When, by contrast, autistic students’ expressions are interpreted through deficit-based lenses, reinforced by severity labels or functioning categories, students’ autonomy and agency are constrained (Fletcher-Watson and Crompton 2019; Grace 2025). Labels such as resistant or non-compliant often obscure sensory overload, uncertainty or alternative modes of contribution. More responsive observational and assessment practices instead describe what a student orients to, how they regulate themselves and which conditions support engagement.

An enactive reconceptualisation reframes autistic experience not as an internal deficit but as a relational phenomenon in which meaning emerges through the coordination of bodies, materials and temporalities (De Jaegher 2013; Delafield-Butt et al. 2020). For practice, this shifts the central question from how students can be brought into alignment with normative patterns to how environments and relationships can be shaped to sustain diverse modes of participation. Misattunements become shared responsibilities, and inclusion becomes a process of mutual adaptation rather than unilateral correction. In schools, this involves rethinking classroom norms, for example, allowing movement, alternative seating or fidget tools; reframing social goals in education plans away from normalising eye contact; and providing professional learning that helps staff recognise autistic students’ relational expressions as meaningful forms of engagement.

Embodied Perception and the Formation of Autistic Worlds

Enactive and embodied approaches argue that perception is not passive reception but an activity of the living body, shaped through ongoing sensorimotor engagement with the environment (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015; De Jaegher 2009). This perspective is essential for understanding autistic experience, where sensory processing, motor coordination and temporal rhythm constitute primary modes of world-formation rather than secondary features. Eigsti (2013) shows that timing, motor planning and sensory filtering play foundational developmental roles; autistic differences in these domains therefore reflect distinct organisational principles of perception rather than deviations from a normative baseline.

Autistic sensory and motor differences give rise to perceptual worlds structured by alternative patterns of salience and coherence (Baggs 2007; Williams 2020a). Heightened or atypical sensory input (Proff et al. 2022) may draw attention to details overlooked by neurotypical observers, while differences in proprioception or movement organisation support idiosyncratic but internally consistent modes of exploration. From an enactive standpoint, behaviours often labelled as repetitive or non-functional can serve as world-stabilising practices that support sensorimotor coherence in unpredictable environments (Eigsti 2013; Grace et al. 2024; Grace 2025; Heasman et al. 2024).

These perceptual orientations directly shape social interaction (De Jaegher 2009). Delafield-Butt and colleagues (2020) show how meaning in interaction with a child with high and complex support needs emerged through micro-movements, shifts in muscular tension and rhythmic pauses. Communication unfolded as an embodied narrative, with partners coordinating through moment-to-moment adjustments rather than symbolic exchange. What may appear as hesitation or opacity to neurotypical observers can thus be understood as relational organisation within the autistic participant’s temporal horizon.

The enactive account highlights that autistic perception enacts a world with its own rhythms and affective momentum (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015; De Jaegher 2013). When neurotypical expectations impose a different tempo, interaction falters not because of impaired understanding but because the temporal conditions for coordination are misaligned (see also Bolis et al. 2017). Recognising these dynamics underscores that autistic ways of orienting are meaningful forms of relational engagement.

Autistic Sociality and Embodied Flow Dynamics

Taking a step back from neuronormative assumptions about the pace, rhythm and form in which communication ought to unfold allows us to witness moments where atypical interaction flourishes, and to identify communicative patterns that may be uniquely neurodivergent.

A now large body of neuro-affirmative communication research demonstrates that when the double empathy problem is not a complicating factor in interaction – i.e. in communication that does not run across different neurotypes – rapport and understanding among autistic communicators is often high (Crompton, Fletcher-Watson, and Ropar 2020a; 2020b; Heasman and Gillespie 2019; Morrison et al. 2019; Williams, Wharton, and Jagoe 2021). Even more tellingly, others have identified what has been described as a uniquely autistic sociality that prospers when untroubled by cross-neurotype interaction conditions (Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist 2019; Heasman and Gillespie 2019; Ochs and Solomon 2010). For example, in their analysis of the interactions between autistic players of a computer game in an autistic-only space, Heasman and Gillespie (2019) identified two seemingly singular features of neurodivergent intersubjectivity: the first a much more generous assumption of common ground than usually observed in neurotypical interaction, and the second a lower demand for coordination that smoothed over any potentially disruptive turns that arose as a result of the first condition.

The intense social flow sometimes observed within exclusively autistic interactions, including shared enthusing and mutual monologing (McDonnell and Milton 2014; Williams Wharton, and Jagoe 2021), may have its roots in a potentially autistic pre-disposition to experience and enter into flow states. Heasman and colleagues (2024) have recently argued that these heightened moments of presence – of feeling in the zone – which can bring great joy and where time is experienced more slowly (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) may be more readily accessed by autistic individuals on account of an increased ability to hyperfocus attention and unique sensory routes. From this perspective, it is the distinctly neurodivergently embodied sensory differences and enactive differences (in terms of where attention is directed, and thus what is enacted) that alter how flow states are reached and how shared social flow might be co-created, given the right conditions.

For educational contexts, recognising embodied perception as world-formation has concrete implications. Behaviours interpreted as withdrawal or challenging may reflect sensory overload or temporal misalignment. Adjusting environmental demands, pacing and sensory load can create conditions in which autistic people, through their specific ways of bodily orientating, can participate in shared activity. This includes offering quieter spaces for transitions, providing noise-reducing options, allowing movement during whole-class instruction and designing tasks that can be engaged at different speeds or through different sensory modalities (for instance, manipulating objects rather than only listening or writing). Rather than expecting students to adapt to a single sensory and temporal template, schools can cultivate multiple, equally valued pathways into the shared learning world.

Interaction as Emergent Process

Social interaction is not a matter of exchanging pre-formed meanings but of co-creating them in real time. Traditional accounts of social cognition frame communication as an interpretative feat, in which each interlocutor draws inferences from the other’s utterances, enriching the meaning of spoken words with context. As such, understanding is seen to be contingent on an individual’s theory of mind ability, or their capacity to mind-read: the act of drawing on another’s perspective to read between the lines of what is spoken aloud to infer the intended speaker meaning. Historically, autistic individuals were wrongly thought to have poor theory of mind abilities – a retrofitted explanation for the apparent breakdowns in mutual understanding between autistic and non-autistic people that have now been better understood as a double empathy problem.

Enactive accounts of meaning-making and social interaction, instead, frame this coordination as an embodied and situated process in which meaning arises through the ongoing adjustments between participants (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015; De Jaegher et al. 2017). Social understanding is therefore a lived achievement of maintaining and repairing patterns of coordination across time, rather than solely the product of mental inference. This resituating of communication back within the body is especially important for those whose embodied experiences (motoric, sensory, etc.) differ from the typical. As Williams (2020b; 2021) has argued, the cognitive heuristics determining effective interpretation of a speaker’s utterances are grounded in assumptions about common ground and shared realities. Within interactions between two individuals with significantly differently enacted worlds and embodied realities, reliance on assumptions of shared perspectives will undoubtedly hinder – rather than facilitate – mutual understanding.

Within an enactive framework, interactions involving autistic and non-autistic people can follow distinct trajectories. Misalignments, hesitations and fragmented rhythms, often interpreted as signs of deficit, reflect the variability inherent in all interaction and become more visible when neurotypical expectations cannot be assumed (Crompton, Fletcher-Watson, and Ropar 2020b; De Jaegher 2013; Milton 2012). Such moments create openings for renegotiation and require partners to attend closely to the micro-dynamics of the exchange. Early interaction research similarly shows that infants co-create meaning through temporal coordination and affective timing before language emerges, suggesting that embodied coordination remains foundational even when its rhythms differ or require scaffolding (Delafield-Butt and Trevarthen 2015).

Empirical studies demonstrate that interactions are shaped by the sensory-motor orientations participants bring to them. Delafield-Butt et al. (2020) show that, for a child with high and complex support needs, interactional flow was organised through patterns of bodily modulation rather than conventional communicative cues. Eigsti (2013) likewise highlights the formative influence of sensory and motor differences on the emergent course of interaction. Participatory sense-making reframes the role of asymmetry within interaction. Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher (2015) show that interactions can remain coherent even when contributions are uneven, provided relational dynamics stay open. This aligns with De Jaegher’s (2023) observation that encounters involving autistic participants often rely on partners who adopt a receptive stance toward nonlinear or unconventional expressive patterns.

For educational contexts, this means that interaction cannot rely solely on rapid question/answer formats or standardised expressive cues. Teachers and support staff need repertoires that include slower, parallel or exploratory modes of coordination, allowing autistic students’ embodied rhythms to contribute to shared activity. Examples include small-group projects organised around side-by-side work; activities that invite gesture, drawing or movement as valid forms of response; and assessments that recognise participation through sustained presence, joint attention to materials or subtle shifts in engagement. Supporting repair processes, such as allowing time for a student to re-enter an interaction after a pause, shifts the focus from performance to co-created coordination.

Finally, interactional agency is understood enactively as emerging within the relational process. Subtle shifts in posture, gaze or sensory engagement can orient the direction of interaction (Delafield-Butt et al. 2020). When participation is evaluated only through normative markers, these expressions of agency remain invisible. Recognising them reframes participation as the co-creation of a relational world in which diverse embodied orientations can contribute. In schools, this may involve treating a student’s movement toward the window, their preferred seating or their engagement with particular sensory objects as active ways of shaping the learning situation, and incorporating these preferences into the collaborative planning of lessons and routines.

Ethical and Phenomenological Value of Opacity

The fragility and variability of interactional coordination highlight that relational sense-making depends not only on interpretive clarity but also, perhaps more so, on openness to difference (De Jaegher 2023; Manning 2013). This insight provides the ground for turning to the ethical value of opacity.

Opacity has gained significant attention within philosophical and ethical discussions of relationality, particularly where difference resists assimilation to dominant interpretive norms. Glissant ([1990] 1997) famously frames opacity as a right, the right not to be fully rendered transparent to another. In this view, opacity does not signal a failure of communication but marks the irreducibility of embodied difference and the fact that not all meaning should, or can, be made immediately intelligible. From an enactive perspective, opacity is a constitutive feature of relational life rather than an obstacle to it (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015; Koubová 2014).

The relevance of opacity becomes clear when we consider how non-normative forms of expression can be over-interpreted or prematurely stabilised in everyday and institutional contexts. Meaning is often inferred too quickly, guided by assumptions about clarity and directness (Ahmed 2000). Such expectations can obscure the experiential richness of autistic people’s expressions and narrow the range of ways in which relational meaning may unfold. Conversely, the loosening of such expectations, as seen in the reduced demand for coordination observed in the autistic sociality described above, can create greater scope for co-conceiving a shared world of embodied difference.

Enactive and other intersubjective theories counter the tendency to narrow the bounds of accepted expressivity by emphasising that meaning emerges through interactional coordination, even engaging with another’s inner states (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015; Froese and Gallagher 2012; Schegloff 1992). Partners can remain partially opaque to one another while still maintaining connection. Insisting on transparency may therefore do more harm to relational depth than allowing for ambiguity, echoing broader ethical arguments in favour of unavailability as a precondition for genuine responsiveness (Rosa 2019).

Autistic interaction illustrates this with particular clarity, as autistic individuals often move or use sound in atypical ways within their communication (Noddings-Walker, Williams, and Heasman in press). Subtle shifts in movement, posture or tension can carry relational significance even when they resist immediate interpretation (Delafield-Butt et al. 2020). These micro-cues become meaningful but through a partner’s willingness to stay open to the evolving dynamic. Here, opacity functions as a relational resource: it invites attunement, patience and responsiveness without presuming interpretive mastery.

In this sense, opacity is not a passive tolerance of not knowing but an active discipline of staying with ambiguity. Interactional work is redirected from explanation toward sustaining conditions in which connection can continue without epistemic capture.

Grace’s (2025) account of Being With those with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities reinforces this point. Being With is not a technique for eliciting meaning but a relational stance oriented toward shared presence without the demand for immediate intelligibility. In contexts of profound intellectual and multiple disabilities, this often involves remaining alongside movements, sounds or orientations whose significance cannot be readily named. Attempts to categorise or translate behaviour narrow the field of possible relation, whereas receptive presence allows the other’s rhythms and temporalities to remain intact. Grace’s work offers a vocabulary for understanding opacity as a dimension of relational dignity: allowing another to remain partially unknowable honours their autonomy and resists assimilative pressures. Meaning emerges not through interpretive closure but through the maintenance of relational continuity over time.

Opacity therefore does not mark withdrawal from sociality but denotes the conditions under which difference can remain intact within relation. It invites shifts in how interaction partners orient themselves, from interpretation to perceptual openness. Understanding can then develop gradually, asymmetrically or through non-normative expressive formats. As De Jaegher (2023) notes, the fragility of autistic/non-autistic coordination often reveals intelligibility grounded in embodied cues rather than normative markers.

The ethical implications are substantial. If transparency becomes a requirement for social recognition, individuals whose expressions diverge from dominant expectations face pressure to alter themselves in order to fit. An ethics of opacity resists this by affirming the right to participate in relation without approximating normative forms. A similar point is made in Rosa’s (2019) account of resonance as a non-instrumental mode of relating. Resonant relations depend on a degree of unavailability: the other cannot be fully controlled or rendered transparent in advance, or ever, and it is precisely this irreducible alterity that enables responsiveness. In this light, relational opacity becomes not a limitation but a precondition for meaningful connection.

For educational and care contexts, not understanding an autistic person at first glance should not trigger immediate correction. It may instead call for slowing down, broadening perceptual attention and accepting ambiguity as part of respectful support. Teachers might observe patterns across situations, and, where possible, make ways for the student to share their perspective. Opacity thus becomes a cue to adjust one’s stance, rather than adjusting the person.

Aldred and Aldred’s (2023) work on embodied education echoes this stance by emphasising felt-sense and bodily knowing as legitimate forms of participation that need not be made fully transparent to be recognised. Relational opacity is therefore not merely a descriptive feature of autistic experience but an ethical principle. It reframes sociality as a space in which difference can shape the interactional field, and where meaning emerges through embodied coexistence rather than interpretive certainty.

Ecological Conditions of Relation

Interaction never occurs in a vacuum. From an enactive perspective, bodies meet within sensory, material, temporal and institutional fields that shape the very possibilities of coordination (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015). Autistic interaction reveals this interdependence with particular clarity because the conditions that tacitly support neurotypical communication – lighting, noise levels, pacing, spatial arrangements – can be destabilising rather than facilitative (Manning, Williams, and MacLennan 2023; McGoldrick et al. 2025). Wood (2020) documents this dynamic empirically, showing how dominant noise regimes in mainstream schools systematically render autistic students’ communicative contributions inaudible or illegible. Understanding autistic relationality on its own terms therefore requires a shift from viewing the individual as the locus of difficulty to attending to the ecological field in which interaction becomes possible or foreclosed.

Grace’s (2025) work further illustrates the interplay between relational opacity and the sensory environment. In her accounts, changes in lighting, noise, spatial arrangement or opportunities for movement fundamentally altered whether Being With could be sustained. In environments characterised by high sensory load or rigid pacing, expressions became fragmented or overwhelming, reducing the possibility of relational attunement. On the other hand, environments that permitted slower tempos, sensory regulation and shared orientation to objects or movement enabled connections to be made and maintained without pressure of interpretation.

From a broader sociological perspective, this resonates with Rosa’s analysis of dynamic stabilisation: institutions organised around acceleration, standardisation and constant evaluative pressure tend to privilege fast, predictable and easily intelligible modes of interaction (Rosa 2013). Under these logics, slower, ambiguous or sensorially mediated forms of participation risk being misread as problematic. Creating more inviting interactional spaces in De Jaegher’s sense can thus also be understood as cultivating spaces of resonance in Rosa’s sense, settings in which students and teachers can affect and be affected without conforming to a single accelerated template of participation.

Empirical studies underscore the ecological nature of autistic people’s relationality. Eigsti (2013) shows that variations in sensory processing and motor timing shape both perception and action. In overstimulating contexts, maintaining embodied coherence can be demanding (Grace 2026a), prompting withdrawal or repetitive movements as strategies of regulation. From an enactive viewpoint, such responses are adaptive ways of stabilising experience in environments that do not support sensory organisation. Similarly, Delafield-Butt et al. (2020) demonstrate that shared engagement with a child with high and complex support needs depended on constructing a sensory-motor field conducive to joint presence: small adjustments in spacing, tempo and movement options significantly altered the possibilities for coordination.

De Jaegher (2023) makes this point explicit in relation to normative expectations. Neurotypical interaction presupposes particular spatial and temporal configurations, face-to-face posture, sustained eye contact and rapid turn-taking that may be unworkable for autistic participants. When environments are organised around these norms, relational mismatches arise not from autistic embodiment alone but from the design of the setting. In response, De Jaegher calls for inviting interactional spaces: environments that accommodate divergent rhythms and do not impose a single template of participation.¹

Grace’s (2025) account of Being With reinforces this ecological insight, showing how changes in lighting, noise, posture or movement opportunities reshape what forms of presence are possible. Relational and ecological ethics cannot be separated: one cannot be meaningfully with another if the environment renders their expressions chaotic, painful or unintelligible. Grace (2026b) argues for a recognition of the unity of experience across the autistic spectrum; we recognise here that ways of adapting to better engage and Be With people with high support needs also enable those with lesser support needs.

These ecological insights align with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which emphasises accessibility, reasonable accommodation and the removal of environmental barriers as prerequisites for participation (United Nations 2006). From an enactive standpoint, this reflects the recognition that participation is an emergent property of organism–environment relations, not a fixed individual capacity (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). In autistic contexts, inclusion cannot be achieved through behavioural modification; it requires transforming the sensory, temporal and spatial conditions under which interaction occurs. Environments that allow varied temporalities, movement patterns and sensory needs create conditions in which autistic modes of sense-making can participate without distortion (Ahmetovic and Kapp 2025).

Viewed this way, inclusion shifts from assimilation to solidarity (Suchanek et al. 2024). Solidarity does not depend on sameness or full mutual comprehension but on a commitment to share a world with others whose embodied orientations differ markedly from one’s own and on a willingness to reshape environments so these orientations can be sustained (Grace 2025; Ahmetovic and McDonnell 2025).

For educational practice, this entails reorienting inclusion policies, teacher education and everyday routines toward the design of relational ecologies: layouts that permit movement and varied sensory focus; schedules that incorporate pauses and transitions; interaction formats that do not rely solely on fast question-answer exchanges; and school cultures that value presence and co-creation over performance. Concrete measures include establishing low-sensory spaces (Mostafa 2014; Ahmetovic and Mills 2025; Aldred and Aldred 2023; McGoldrick et al. 2025), offering flexible seating and standing options, co-designing classroom norms with autistic students and revising behaviour policies so that regulation strategies such as rocking, pacing or using grounding objects are recognised as legitimate. Teacher-education programmes can foreground how lighting, acoustics and pacing can transform interactional possibilities. Ecological design thus becomes the material counterpart to an ethics of relational opacity and Being With, affirming that inclusion means creating environments in which embodied differences can meet without being pressed into uniformity.

A related practical framework appears in Aldred and Aldred’s approach to embodied education (2023), which invites educators to design learning spaces that are sensory-considerate, movement-responsive and attuned to co-regulation. Their emphasis on welcoming diverse embodied rhythms directly resonates with the ecological account developed here.

Conclusion

The analyses developed in this article show that interactions involving autistic and non-autistic persons cannot be understood through frameworks that treat normative intelligibility, speed or transparency as universal conditions of social life. Across the empirical and theoretical materials examined here, a consistent pattern emerges: moments of friction in mixed-neurotype interaction are less the result of autistic communication itself than of normative expectations about how interaction ought to unfold (De Jaegher 2023). When interaction is judged only against these norms, contributions grounded in different sensory or temporal orientations become invisible. Inclusion therefore requires attending to the conditions under which coordination becomes possible, not simply to individual behaviour.

The ethical dimension of this shift is captured by the notion of relational opacity. Rather than presuming that communication must be fully transparent to be meaningful, opacity affirms the legitimacy of expressions that remain partially untranslatable within dominant interpretive frames. Grace’s (2025) account of Being With illustrates how relational depth can emerge without interpretive mastery; meaning can be shared even when it does not fit normative templates of clarity.

Relational success is thus not an individual achievement but an ecological one.

Sensory load, spatial arrangement, tempo and institutional routines profoundly shape interactional possibilities (De Jaegher 2023; Delafield-Butt et al. 2020; Eigsti 2013). Environments that impose rigid pacing, sensory unpredictability or narrow behavioural expectations constrain relational agency, whereas those that support movement, flexible timing and multiple channels of engagement create conditions in which diverse modes of sense-making can flourish.

This ecological and relational framing also resonates with broader efforts to decolonise knowledge production. As Grace et al. (2024) argue, dominant research traditions often privilege extraction, categorisation and interpretive authority, reproducing epistemic hierarchies that marginalise those whose ways of being do not fit neatly into existing models. Being With offers a counter-practice: it relinquishes the demand to render the other fully knowable on the researcher’s terms.

Relational opacity can be seen as an ethical refusal of epistemic domination. Knowledge is not gathered about the other but emerges with them, contingently and relationally.

Across educational and social-care contexts, this leads to concrete implications:

• Interactional pacing: Allow slower rhythms, extended pauses and nonlinear trajectories.

• Perceptual attunement: Attend to micro-movements, sensory orientation and emerging rhythms rather than relying on standardised expressive markers.

• Ecological responsibility: Design environments with attention to sensory load, lighting, spatial layout and opportunities for movement.

• Multiple forms of participation: Recognise parallel activity, object-mediated attention and rhythmic coordination as valid contributions to relational life (in line with the principles of Universal Design for Learning).

• Ethical stance: Approach ambiguity with patience and humility, acknowledging that understanding often develops gradually and that not-yet-knowing is itself a legitimate and ethically necessary position for educators to occupy, rather than a deficiency to be overcome.

• Institutional reframing: Shift inclusion from training social competence to co-creating environments that support diverse embodied trajectories.

• Relational calibration: Adopt a stance of continual checking, re-checking and re-alignment, acknowledging that pacing, perception, environments and forms of participation are never fixed but require ongoing adjustment in response to the evolving relational becoming of participants and situations.

Systemic change of this kind begins not with large-scale reform alone but with local acts of institutional patience: one teacher who allows a student to rock, one school that co-designs its sensory spaces with autistic students, one policy that replaces compliance with co-creation. These micro-level shifts are not merely symbolic – they are the material through which broader institutional reorientation becomes thinkable.

Taken together, these insights invite a redefinition of inclusion as an ecological and relational project grounded in solidarity, one that holds together participatory sense-making, relational opacity, Being With and embodied flow dynamics, and follows how these relational logics take shape in the everyday interactional practices of classrooms across different educational contexts. Solidarity does not demand sameness or full comprehension but a willingness to reshape environments so that different embodied orientations can be sustained. Autistic ways of moving, attending and relating thus become not challenges to be corrected but vital expansions of how human relationality can be lived.

Cultivating spaces for embodied difference means recognising that no single rhythm, sensory profile or communicative style exhausts the possibilities of being together. It positions autistic participants as co-constructors of shared worlds whose modes of engagement can transform what counts as communication, presence and learning. Embracing relational opacity requires institutional patience and understanding as much as individual attunement. Only by embracing these transformations can inclusion become a lived practice rather than an aspirational ideal. For schools, this entails an ongoing commitment to listening to autistic students and communities, co-designing environments and curricula, and treating relational opacity and embodied difference not as obstacles but as generative starting points for new forms of education.

Community Involvement Statement

Community involvement informed the development of this article. The author team includes autistic and non-autistic researchers, a practitioner working in the field, and researchers who are also parents of autistic children. Lived experience of autism and parenting experience intersect, contributing multiple forms of experiential expertise. These perspectives shaped the conceptual framing and interpretation of the arguments in ways intended to align with neurodiversity-affirming and participatory priorities in autism research.

Additional File

The additional file for this article can be found as follows: