Christian Hanser describes his theory and practice of relating – via the traditional dwelling of the shepherd’s hut – in ‘vagabond ways’ to spheres that once seemed inaccessible to him due to neuronormative standards in work opportunities and career development.
Acknowledging a traditional dwelling
The emerging neurodivergent educational theory and practice that I want to share through this article has been made concrete thanks to a vehicle. The wooden caravan I use, as a community educator, is a contemporary reproduction of traditional shepherd’s huts, the mobile dwellings and (seasonal) shelters of sheep-herders. The Welcome Hut project that I initiated and that I refer to in this article installs such a hut in public spaces to provoke gestures of hospitality and collective daydreaming around the vehicle’s wood-fired stove. By locating human connectivity outdoors, educational activities that are usually delivered in seated, indoor settings of institutions can potentially be disrupted towards more-than-human spheres. Such disorientation from anthropocentrism challenges the need for linear models in educational interventions and their adjacent preoccupation with metrics and measurement, thereby transcending the illusion of ‘mastery‘ towards the improvised flows that may emerge without a fixed script. I offer pop-up encounter arts to the sectors of social work, culture, healthcare and education, and having established a continuity (since 2010) of these temporary, provisional interventions allows me in return to relate in vagabond ways to these spheres that once seemed inaccessible to me. Hence, itinerancy has become a way to craft an alternative to standardised work opportunities and career development that are largely engineered according to neurotypical models and which do not allow my neurodivergences to breathe within my professional identity.
The agency of opting out and being unhoused
Avishek Ray’s research is useful to explore this (literary) figure of migration beyond Eurocentric readings, which either highly romanticise the vagabond or portray a societally relegated outcast:
[T]he Bangla word for ‘vagabond’ – bhabaghure – an amalgamation of bhaba (meaning ‘earth’) and ghure, derived from the Sanskrit root ghum (meaning ‘to travel’) – does not invoke the pejorative connotation already embedded in the English word, derived from the Latin vagari (‘vague’, that is, lack of clarity). Likewise, the Sanskrit synonyms for ‘vagabond’ are rarely pejorative. Conversely, the pejorative element in the English language has accrued over time.
(Ray 2020, 110)
The deliberate vagueness of the hut as a vagabond spatiality in society can be a gateway into emancipation: “the concept of ‘vagabond’, though working as a functional umbrella, is notoriously nebulous. Can we say with a modicum of certitude that we know what [the word ‘vagabond’ exactly means? In other words, how many of us can define a ‘vagabond’?” (Ray 2022, 6). I argue that the figure of the vagabond, and the hut as a vagabond vehicle for non-linear and sinuous ways to belong, offers subversive and inventive ways through which vagueness as an itinerant educational practice of unsettling and discomfort can hold open a space for being at home on the move, and ultimately for acting meaningfully towards neurodivergent thriving. This is about the agency of opting out and being unhoused in categories that can be experienced as socially constructed, neuronormative traps.
Vagabond belongings from a neurodivergent perspective
Technically just 6m² in size, the possibility of using a roadworthy shepherd’s hut as my workplace has opened up a much larger window for discreet sense-making in society. Prior to working accompanied by the vehicle, I had mostly been withdrawn from professional activity due to the neurotypically designed workplaces and career guidance frameworks that I encountered. These places and frameworks ask for compensatory optimisation of the individual to fit in, rather than allowing one to find one’s own divergent voice. Success and recognition in such frameworks can easily spin into unhealthy spirals, as Ellingson writes in the context of academic achievements: “The better we become at hiding our disabilities completely, or in overfunctioning to provide industrious cover to our visible disabilities, the more we reinforce the ableist assumption that disabled scholars do not belong in the academy until or unless we can function without needing accommodations. This strengthens the idea that we also do not really need accommodations, given that at times we have managed to succeed despite their absence. Our resilience, creativity and exhaustion are taken as proof that there is nothing wrong with the status quo instead of evidence of the extraordinary lengths that we go to succeed and prove we can contribute positively to our universities” (Ellingson 2021, 27).
The vehicle can be seen as a bridge into more autonomous professional belongings as it allowed me to bring to the fore the strengths of my overlapping neurodivergences (openness for creative sparks and special, in-depth interests) rather than compensate for their alleged shortcomings (of low attention and of a focus on narrow detail, for example). Working with a practice that I have started to theorise as a pop-up civic sanctuary on wheels also means that my work life has become coated and covered with the second skin of that wooden caravan, a layer of sensory filtering that helps me – not just to survive but to thrive in a relational posture and in social contexts that could otherwise trigger sensory overwhelm, melt- or shutdowns. The hut as my first professionalising experience does not perpetuate the normalisation of coping awaited from being thrown into one‘s first employment contract and then being expected to make one’s way to the top. During my studies, the obligatory internships in an MSc degree in Education had proven highly stressful and energy-depleting because I constantly felt overwhelmed when trying to navigate these busy institutions for the short timeframes of the placements.
In the first years of freelance work through the Welcome Hut project I particularly enjoyed working collaboratively with institutions on tailor-made projects. I could positively immerse because I knew that I would return in the evening into my own sphere of perception, be able to decide on the days of rest and possibly reject productivity frames if they depleted my sensory reservoirs. This playfulness around the permanency of departures is the modus operandi which ensures better control over my own energy levels and reduces resource depletion. Instead of returning each day into the same neurotypical workplace designs, I negotiate these with my own neurodivergent routine and the form of belonging offered by my neurodiversity-affirmative hut as a professionalising shelter. I gradually co-constructed an associative infrastructure around the use of the hut that I could safely return to, whereas permanent affiliation to a large-scale employer would have triggered the feeling of being trapped inside the two harmful conditions of capitalism analysed by Chapman:
Either it ‘values’ us, in which case it makes us workers and mercilessly exploits us, making us ill through the alienation such exploitation brings. Or, it disvalues us, making us disabled and discriminating against us as part of the surplus population. This often pushes us into poverty and positions us to be treated as disposable. However each of our minds is constituted, we are caught between these two options, neither good for us, and both harmful in different ways. Many of us sit somewhere between these two extremes, or fall from one into the other at different points in our lives.”
(Chapman 2023, 154)
The hut allows me to take the risk of belonging, but on terms that fit (not ideally but still better) my neurodivergences. The relational vehicle is both a bubble away from the neurotypically wired educational world and a bubble towards meaningful encounters that take their starting point in the celebration of neurodivergent joys rather than compensatory functioning. Bringing the hut into public spaces in order to facilitate a collective form of ‘introvert conviviality‘ is much less exhausting than attending these same environments without the spatial co-facilitator and sensory refuge of the hut. Such unsheltered exposures would merely perpetuate the loop of being confronted with the tacit norms of extravert socialising that one has to adapt to, leave or shut down from.
Touring academia and building community beyond extractivist science
The hut has enabled the Welcome Hut project to build an emancipatory praxis of shared retreat, collectively hiding away in a civic sanctuary. Itinerant relationality thereby avoids the (perceived and endured) trap of being sedentarised into a noisy form of socialising that standardises masking as normative participation. From 2018, the associative hut infrastructure also entered the field of Higher Education. In a doctoral thesis, which journeyed alongside the shepherd’s hut trajectories within formal educational settings, the community praxis was translated into an arts-based research methodology moored on the wheels of the hut encounter space.
In the face of the precarities for early career researchers, the continuation of wandering with shepherd’s huts in academia ought to use disruptive formats and enable new imaginaries. One idea is a horizontal hospitality commons: cultivating acts of collectively hiding away as an alternative to vertical, individual career progression. I propose to further explore shared retreat as a liberatory praxis challenging mainstreamed knowledge production and extraction by touring campus environments in vagabond ways. My Critical Neurodiversity Studies Fellowship from Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities is the starting point to cover the logistics of getting the pop-up tour going. A stop-over of the hut would not have to become a time-consuming duty to run a perfectly planned event, but could be an occasion to embrace an imperfect and playful experimentation.
About the author
Christian Hanser (he/him) is a neurodivergent community educator based in France and Germany and a postdoctoral researcher. He uses arts-based, narrative methods (autoethnography, existential mapping and digital storytelling) to challenge the formats of a neurotypically wired educational world and make sense of being in/out of academia. He has previously helped to develop new ECR networking formats: www.tinycampusontour.eu.
This work was supported by the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, which has been funded by Wellcome under grant reference 226798/Z/22/Z. Elements of this article were first published in Christian’s doctoral thesis: Wandering with a shepherd’s hut: fragments of a vagabond methodology.
Christian is one of the Critical Neurodiversity Studies Fellows at the Institute for Medical Humanities. If you want to host the hut as an early career researcher at your institution, please get in touch via email: christian.h.hanser@durham.ac.uk. Hut hosts could let everyone on their campus know in advance that a hut is coming or could just see what happens on the day. A video of the hut in academic environments is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbmbz6NZZ5M.
About the Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference
Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Directions/Intersections/Contradictions was a free fully-hybrid international conference that ran from 24-26 June 2025 at Durham University and online. It is believed to have been the first formal research event in the field undertaken at this scale, responding to a gathering energy and engagement with neurodiversity across disciplines and methodologies. The conference takeover of The Polyphony ran from 23-30 June, with the full collection of articles available under the Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference 2025 tag.
References
Chapman, Robert. 2023. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Ellingson, Laura L. 2021. “A leg to stand on: irony, autoethnography and ableism in the academy.” In Lived Experiences of Ableism in Academia: Strategies for Inclusion in Higher Education ed. N. Brown. Bristol: Policy Press.
Ray, Avishek. 2020. “The ‘vagabond’ as a nemesis of the tourist: toward a postcolonial critique of Zygmunt Bauman.” Tourism, Culture & Communication 20, 107–116.
Ray, Avishek. 2022. The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Resilience, Agency and Representation. New Delhi: Routledge India. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367808914
