The frontier document inventories what the field has not yet done that the curriculum is positioned to attempt. Frontiers are described in three registers: empirical gaps, methodological gaps, conceptual gaps. The cross-field bridges name where the curriculum draws scaffolding from outside the autism-and-ADHD literature. The candidate interventions name what the curriculum is offering as frontier-locating contribution, with the gaps each contribution is positioned to address.
The curriculum's design draws scaffolding from outside the autism-and-ADHD primary literature. Naming the bridges is part of locating the curriculum honestly within the field's intellectual ecology.
| Bridge | What it supplies | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ND ↔ Black liberation theology ↔ clinical psychotherapy | The political-theological grounding for rest-as-resistance and for the curriculum's facilitator self-audit. Connects Hersey's source tradition to clinical container. | Hersey 2022; Lorde 1988; Brueggemann 2014 Sabbath as Resistance; Howard Thurman 1949 Jesus and the Disinherited; Amos Yong 2007, 2011; John Swinton 2012, 2016 |
| Critical disability studies ↔ group-therapy literature | The political analysis of clinical container and the operational vocabulary of group dynamics. Connects Chapman's empire analysis to Yalom's therapeutic factors. | Chapman 2021, 2023; Walker 2021; Yergeau 2017; Yalom & Leszcz 2020 |
| Somatic therapy ↔ monotropism | Pacing logic, demand-avoidance reframe, sensory architecture. Replaces the contested polyvagal scaffolding with predictive-processing and allostatic-load framing. | Murray-Lesser-Lawson 2005; Dwyer 2024; predictive-processing literature; Sterling on allostatic load |
| ED recovery ↔ ND identity | The mechanism by which masking-related identity erosion produces eating disorder vulnerability and the recovery work that re-grounds ND identity. Connects Brian's clinical practice to the curriculum's identity-development commitments. | The ARFID-and-autism overlap literature; Mandy 2022; the broader ED-and-autism comorbidity literature |
| Liberation pedagogy ↔ facilitator self-audit | Operationalises the political-philosophical commitments into facilitator competency. Connects Okun's white-supremacy-culture characteristics to bell hooks's engaged pedagogy and Mingus's access intimacy. | Okun 1999/2021; hooks 1994; Mingus 2017-2022; brown 2017 |
The curriculum's contribution is not a single innovation. It is the integration of five moves, each of which is licensed by the literature individually but which has not been integrated previously. The five are ranked below by the strength of the literature license and by the empirical floor under the integration.
What it is: Allies attend as first-class participants with weighted speaking time and witnesses-not-protagonists framing. Curious participants (those exploring whether ND framing fits their experience) attend as legitimate cohort members rather than as adjuncts requiring diagnostic verification.
Gap addressed: No published ND-affinity-group protocol implements allies as first-class with risk-mitigation architecture. No published curriculum creates the curious category as legitimate.
Literature license: Disability-justice literature on access intimacy (Mingus); couples-therapy literature on bilateral accountability; AASPIRE 2019 inclusion principles.
Empirical floor: Pilot. The first cohort generates the first evaluation evidence.
Risk: Allies dominating speaking time; ally-protagonist confusion; curious participants experiencing inadvertent gatekeeping. Mitigated through weighted-speaking-time architecture, witnesses-not-protagonists framing, and explicit curious-participant legitimacy in recruitment copy.
What it is: Rest Is Resistance, The Body Is Not an Apology, Laziness Does Not Exist, and Unmasking Autism become primary readings rather than ornamental epigraphs. The five-part session structure (text engagement, somatic practice, dialogue, action commitment, closing ritual) braids the readings into operational practice across ten weeks.
Gap addressed: No published group-therapy curriculum has woven these specific texts into structured session work.
Literature license: Continuing-education seminars increasingly reference the texts; bell hooks's engaged-pedagogy tradition supplies the methodological architecture.
Empirical floor: Pilot. Outcome evaluation will document whether the integration produces measurable affirming-therapy outcomes (Flower 2025 items) and whether the liberation-pedagogy commitments survive the clinical container without flattening.
Risk: Hersey-secularization risk (addressed in tensions.html); reading-load mismatch with executive-function realities (addressed through chapter-rather-than-book pacing and audio availability).
What it is: Cohort composition is pan-ND (autism, ADHD, AuDHD, broader umbrella). Shared psychoeducational core covers monotropism, masking, burnout, double empathy, and the liberation-pedagogy primary readings. Differentiated practice elements meet diagnostic-presentation specificity within the shared cohort.
Gap addressed: No closed-cohort pan-ND protocol with shared core and differentiated practice exists in the published literature.
Literature license: Dwyer 2024 (trans-diagnostic monotropism); Wise (Neurodivergent-Affirming DBT Workbook) practitioner architecture.
Empirical floor: AE3 for the trans-diagnostic monotropism extension. The pan-ND group-composition outcome question is empirically open.
Risk: Within-cohort heterogeneity exceeding the shared-core capacity to integrate; differentiated-practice architecture failing to meet diagnostic specificity. Mitigated through facilitator self-audit prompts on within-cohort heterogeneity and through cohort-honesty in recruitment.
What it is: Participants complete the masking questionnaire (CAT-Q), the autism spectrum identity scale (ASIS), and the monotropism questionnaire (MQ) at intake. Results are returned to the participant as self-knowledge during the early sessions rather than retained as clinician-only data.
Gap addressed: The intake-as-clinician-data convention treats psychometric instruments as confidential clinical material. Returning the battery inverts the convention.
Literature license: AASPIRE 2019 inclusion principles; the broader participant-as-co-investigator methodological move in CBPR autism research.
Empirical floor: AE2 for the CAT-Q (Hull et al. 2018); AE3 for the ASIS and MQ (younger instruments with smaller validation literatures); AE4 for the inversion-as-design-choice (theoretically licensed, not RCT-tested).
Risk: Participants encountering psychometric self-data without sufficient scaffolding; pan-ND population validity questions for autism-specific instruments. Mitigated through guided session work on the instruments and through cohort-honesty about the autism-centric instrument base.
What it is: A standing facilitator self-audit instrument that prompts attention to white-supremacy-cultural urgencies (Okun: perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, worship of the written word, quantity over quality), to engaged-pedagogy commitments (hooks: relational presence, vulnerability as method, refusal of detached expertise), and to access intimacy (Mingus: anticipatory care, the labour of disability access). The audit runs at intake, mid-cohort, and at closure.
Gap addressed: The facilitator-competency literature (Yalom, the affirming-paradigm Delphi work) has not yet operationalised the political-philosophical commitments into a self-audit instrument.
Literature license: Okun 1999/2021; hooks 1994; Mingus 2017-2022; brown 2017; Chapman 2023's analysis of clinical container as politically situated.
Empirical floor: AE4 (theoretical). The instrument is design rather than evidence-tested practice. The first cohort's evaluation will document the instrument's effects on facilitator behaviour and participant experience.
Risk: Facilitator self-audit becoming performative or punitive rather than reflective; the instrument exceeding what a single facilitator can hold in mind across a session. Mitigated through audit pacing (intake, mid-cohort, closure rather than session-by-session) and through supervisor scaffolding.
The five candidate interventions are positioned for empirical contact rather than completed as evidence-based practice. The next step the curriculum would license, after first-cohort completion, is mixed-methods evaluation co-designed with participants, pre-registered against AASPIRE 2019 standards, with affirming outcome instruments alongside conventional ones, with qualitative work on the first-class-allies architecture's relational dynamics, and with attention to the within-cohort heterogeneity the pan-ND design has to absorb. The evaluation would not aim at does the curriculum work as a yes-no question; it would aim at what does the integration produce, with the answer described in the registers the field actually produces.
The field is in motion. Flower 2025 is the most recent operationalisation of affirming therapy, and the operationalisation will continue to develop. The 2024 origins correction has put pressure on the citation economy that the field's reckoning will continue. The mad-studies dialogue that McWade-Milton-Beresford 2015 began has not yet been fully developed. The AAC-user theorist tradition's integration into mainstream affirming-paradigm work has only begun. The non-Anglophone scholarship that the citation graph occludes will become more accessible as translation infrastructure improves. The curriculum sits in a field that is changing, and the curriculum's own contributions will be evaluated against a moving baseline. The frontier document records the curriculum's position on 2026-04-29; the field's position on 2027-04-29 will be different.
What will not change is the curriculum's commitment to honest cohort-naming, to AE-tier-pinned claims, to visible-absence accounting, and to the integration of liberation-pedagogy primary readings with autistic-phenomenological scaffolding inside a clinical container that the curriculum chooses with eyes open. The first cohort begins the empirical work the review's literature can only license. The literature has done what literature can do. The work that remains is the work the participants will help to do.