This article explores how neurodivergent perspectives can transform accessible museology in Italy. Using a hybrid qualitative methodology and an autoethnographic case study conducted with Fateci Posto APS, it examines how sensory environments, institutional practices, and co-designed museum visits can boost agency, sensory regulation, and societal participation. The study highlights structural barriers within educational departments, and introduces a repeatable toolkit that supports trust, autonomy, and sustained participation. It argues that neurodivergence operates as a situated epistemic resource capable of reshaping museum policies, educational practice, and modes of cultural participation.
This article conceptualizes co-contracting as a narrative and adaptive design process that leads to a co-created contract – a co-contract – functioning as a shared script for collaboration and goal-achievement. Rather than starting from pre-existing templates, co-contracting begins with the co-creation of a shared plot that articulates the purpose, expectations, and trajectory of the collaboration. Focusing on collaborations between creatives and businesses, the article argues that effective contracting requires more than legal enforceability. Co-contracting is framed around three pillars: building relationships and trust, enabling collaborative sense-making, and ensuring fairness. Information design is suggested as a tool for the operationalization of
This article examines multi-role music careers, focusing on the dual identity of artist and entrepreneur. Although entrepreneurial activity is common in music careers, many musicians experience tension between their artistic and entrepreneurial roles, feeling reluctant to identify as entrepreneurs. To address this, the article discusses the concept of artpreneurship as an adaptive career identity that dynamically integrates artistic and entrepreneurial roles. Drawing on role theory and the social cognitive career theory career self-management model, a multi-role career management framework is proposed. This article contributes to the fields of music career development and arts entrepreneurship, providing a foundation for future research.
This article critically examines television portrayals of autistic characters in Atypical, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, The Good Doctor, Community, and Sesame Street through qualitative content analysis informed by the affirmative model of disability and critical disability studies. It interrogates stereotypes such as the savant trope, explores authentic casting debates, and considers cultural and pedagogical implications for art education. Drawing on scholarship and lived experience as an autistic educator, the study argues that media representations shape public and educational perceptions, advocating for inclusive practices that affirm neurodivergent identities and dismantle ableism in visual culture and classrooms.
This article introduces “mind-meandering,” an embodied, neurodivergent approach to mindfulness that challenges ableist norms and institutional ideas of production in education and wellness. It reframes neurodivergence as an alternative mode of presence and creation, addressing oppressive structures. Using videomaking and narrative arts-based research, the authors offer similar artistic approaches for art education classrooms. These practices validate “crip time,” embracing nonlinear thought and sensory awareness as powerful ways of engaging with the environment. Rejecting ableist ideals of time, focus, and performance, these artistic experiments foster neurodivergent mindfulness that supports creative inquiry, inclusivity, and mental health in art education.
This article explores how creative practitioners navigate uncertainty and complexity in times of polycrisis by engaging beyond traditional arts institutions across societal sectors. Drawing on dialogic, practice-based inquiry, the authors reflect on experiences in art education and cross-sector collaborations to examine how practitioners can be supported to work ethically, relationally, and meaningfully. Our dialogues highlight four interrelated capacities: embracing not knowing, developing perceptive awareness, fostering relational interdependence, and remaining open to emergence. These capacities enable creative practitioners to co-shape professional trajectories, contribute to societal transformation, and cultivate new collaborative spaces that respond to complexity.
This article explores the Challenge Lab Process (CLP) developed for forming and facilitating cross-sector partnerships as part of an exploratory co-research project. The project aims to expand the landscape of collaborations between artists/creative professionals and companies, and to develop partnerships that are mutually beneficial, fair, and equal. The CLP process is visualized and described through four phases: Co-Initiation, Challenge Lab, Co-Creation and Delivery. The results provide a basis for an artpreneurship playbook. At present, the process relies heavily on the researchers' role in mediating these partnerships, and more research is needed to optimise mediation roles.
This thematic issue of Research in Arts and Education focuses on artpreneurship, a topic that has received increasing attention within and beyond Aalto University, the institutional home of this journal. Many authors of this thematic issue are or have been affiliated with the Luova Lämpiö (Creative Agora) co-research project (2024–2025), hosted at Aalto University, and funded by Business Finland and NextGenerationEU. This thematic issue not only disseminates some of the findings of Luova Lämpiö but also serves as an invitation to broaden the discussion on artpreneurship beyond the project participants.
This visual essay shares five details of artistic and performative approaches to text called text(ile) writing, which engages with text through texture. The texture of language is understood as the experience of a quality moving into articulation, be it on paper, in air, or otherwise. This approach brings neuroqueer perspectives to linguistic practices through and with art, by a playful engagement with writing and its settings. Here writing is not a linear exchange from one contained rhetor to another, but rather a meaning making practice between and among, emerged and produced through material conditions.
Artpreneurship, the confident neologism that unites art and entrepreneurship, risks sanitizing precisely what makes them vital: their capacity for excess and transgression. Drawing on Georges Bataille's distinction between the general economy of expenditure and the restricted economy of utility, this paper reads artpreneurship through three cases – Warhol, Koons, and Thomas Kinkade, the trademarked "Painter of Light™" – utilizing this as a way to call for a more critical approach to the term. A Bataillean artpreneurship, the paper argues, must remain open to the sacred, the wasteful, and the unsettling – or risk becoming a polished system for selling mugs.
In video works that externalize embodied experiences of interaction and reflection, the autistic creators Sonia Boué and Mel Baggs separately balance words and imagery to articulate intimacy with the physical world, in the service of affirming a political consciousness of neurodivergent personhood. In this essay I elucidate the compelling communicative strategies of artworks and texts by Baggs and Boué, to highlight sympathetic pedagogical and psychiatric projects which have helped to create space for autistic artistic experiences, and to point to the gaps all of these figures illuminate in Western aesthetic philosophy and art education.
Neurodiversity is a term that, in one sense, quite plainly denotes the vastly diverse neurological experiences of all humans. In another resolutely political orientation, neurodiversity is a ‘paradigm’ that actively challenges the pathologizing of those who are not in line with neuro-normative mental, cognitive, and/or behavioral ideals. In this thematic issue, we present a platform for neurodivergent and neuro-affirming allies and advocates in the arts to contribute articles, visual essays, and commentaries that analyze and challenge ableist societal attitudes and practices that stigmatize neurodivergent bodyminds and ways of being.
This essay recommends designing hiring and recruitment practices to support neurodivergent applicants in the arts and cultural sector. It is aimed at new and emerging hiring managers within small and mid-sized arts and cultural institutions. The conversation is set within the context of the changing landscape in arts employment, including recent shifts in on-the-ground conditions for arts managers with hiring responsibilities, the impact of the passion tax within the arts, and the experiences of neurodivergent employees in relation to career outcomes. The essay concludes with recommendations for making hiring and recruitment more inclusive and accessible for neurodivergent candidates.
This commentary introduces the foundations of Aalto University’s Artpreneurship research and development project, situating it within the Aalto University’s history. Drawing on insights from individuals and key projects, it maps the origins, evolving focus areas, and rationale of the research orientation. Framed by the authors’ collaborative experiences, it traces where, when, and why the term emerged and how it developed into research projects. Acknowledging influences from geopolitics, global shifts, and the diverse expertise of team members, the commentary clarifies the background and distinctive features of Aalto Artpreneurship, articulating its current research areas and future intentions for research and practice.
Artificial intelligence can convincingly mimic human voice and likeness, as well as artistic style. The promise is democratization of creative expression, yet it comes at the expense of reduced economic opportunities, incentives, and creative integrity. Traditional intellectual property rights regimes were not designed for the artificial imitation of a performer’s or author’s recognizable voice, likeness, or style. The resulting harms often concern persona, attribution, and artistic identity, rather than direct reproduction of a specific work or recorded performance. This article draws from legal analysis, performance theory, and economic insights to evaluate these imitations through their association, misattribution, and substitution effects.
Organizations are increasingly looking beyond conventional tools to navigate complexity, cultural change, and the limits of data-driven decision-making. Artistic engagement has shown the capacity to reshape how people see, interpret, and relate to the realities they inhabit – yet how it actually operates has remained poorly understood. This article develops a typology of four meaning-making orientations – expressive, interpretive, symbolic, and radical – arguing that artistic engagement does not work in one direction only. It may deepen individual experience, open collective interpretation, stabilize shared meanings, or unsettle assumptions that had long gone unquestioned. The typology offers a foundation for more
An increasing number of neurodivergent individuals are enrolling in colleges and universities, where they often encounter a wide range of challenges, such as ableist attitudes, policies, and practices, emotional distress, and academic struggles. This Commentary examines issues of equity and access for neurodivergent higher education music students through discussion and analysis of two initiatives at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The recommendations of neurodivergent researchers and neurodivergent higher education community members are employed as a critical lens for these initiatives, and as a framework for the field.
This study explores art educators’ entrepreneurial ventures, contributing to the artpreneurship research agenda. Through semi-structured interviews with graduates from Aalto University’s Art Education major, it examines the motivations behind their entrepreneurial pursuits. The study adopts a feminist perspective on entrepreneurship and analyzes the interview data using inductive content analysis. Key findings indicate that art educators find entrepreneurship personally rewarding and emancipatory but would benefit from a broader understanding of the professional ecosystem and the transferability of their competencies. These insights inform future research on art educators’ working lives and the development of Finnish higher education.
This essay moves, thinks, and wanders through an artistic research process that emerged during a study alongside intellectually disabled middle and high school students. Authors gesture towards their unfolding dynamics as the essay asks how art matters as an analytic within/through/around the process, and what implications this may have for blurring “set” identity markers and boundaries, such as time, space, and authorship. Together, the artworks and written text weave threads of analysis that resist closure.
Neurodivergent students’ access to vocational performer training is a quickly developing research area, reflecting sector-wide expectations to improve inclusion. In this paper, the authors take a particular focus on ADHD experiences to articulate and apply a process of paying neuroqueer attention to critically examine neuronormativity in drama school environments. They utilise neuroqueerness to expose these norms and suggest ways to disrupt them both in individual practice and by bringing neurodivergent knowledge to the attention of others. They propose how processes of paying neuroqueer attention can transform not only training, but also the wider performing arts industry.
