Working Together

- I think the biggest piece of advice I would have from a researcher to an autistic research collaborator, if that's okay. Can I shift the question a little? Is kind of looping back to things that Michael has kind of touched on already about this balance between kind of wanting to go deeper on these different avenues, but then also realizing that that's not always feasible. I think researchers are often tied in a lot of ways to, you know, the institutional bureaucracy or you know, the funding mechanisms, requirements and things like that. And so if there's, in a collaboration, if you put forth an idea about, "Oh, I think we should study this, or we should do it this way," just being open to the idea that we might not always be able to do that, right? Just because... Which is not to say that it's not a fabulous idea or, you know, we wanna do that in the future, but sometimes we do need to balance that kind of the needs of multiple different agencies and inputs with the feasibility, with, you know, where it can go in the long term. So just kind of recognizing that, and working in a collaborative way to kind of reach the best possible outcome for that particular project.

- I think that's a really good message. It really suggests that in research it has to go both ways for it to work. Both the researcher has to understand the unique needs and differences that an autistic partner brings, as well as the autistic partner understanding what the expectations are from our end.