Overview
Autistic Scholars is an independent research organization producing theoretical and empirical work on cognitive regulatory architecture and its consequences across biological and social systems.
The work begins from a specific observation: that contemporary psychology has implicitly adopted the cognitive architecture of majority social interaction as its normative baseline, treating one regulatory strategy as the unmarked standard for human social functioning. This renders alternative architectures visible only as deviation or deficit.
Our research makes this baseline visible and examines its consequences across multiple levels of analysis—from the phenomenological identification of distinct regulatory systems, through their computational formalization under energetic constraint, to the physiological and molecular consequences of sustained architectural mismatch within environments calibrated to a single norm.
The work treats autistic lived experience not as anecdotal supplement but as situated knowledge capable of generating formal theory. Autistic perspectives function as analytical vantage points—positions from which normally implicit regulatory processes become explicit objects of analysis. This orientation draws on feminist epistemology, critical psychology, disability studies, and the double empathy framework.
The organization maintains an ongoing research program, with working papers and publications released on a rolling basis across multiple platforms. It supports an open and evolving network of affiliated researchers and collaborators.
Founding Scholar
Ericwilliam Brown is the founder and principal investigator of Autistic Scholars, an independent research organization. He is a twice-exceptional, Black, queer, late-diagnosed autistic, independent researcher. His research examines the epistemology of psychological classification, the regulatory architecture of social cognition, and the consequences of sustained cross-architecture interaction at neural, metabolic, and ecological levels of analysis.
Correspondence: ericwilliam@autisticscholars.org · ORCID (opens in a new tab) · Google Scholar (opens in a new tab)