Call for Participants
We are forming a community of neurodivergent individuals from the Cavan, Fermanagh and Omagh area to co-design creative responses to the climate emergency through a series of cross-border workshops between February and July 2025.
If you’re based in Cavan, Fermanagh, or Omagh, are over the age of 25 and have an interest in climate action, we’d love to hear from you.
We recently held an online information session on 13 February 2025, to introduce the project and answer questions. If you missed it, you can watch the recording and review the slides.
If you’re interested in getting involved, feel free to reach out.
Email: laura@alanjamesburns.com
Divergently Together is a shared-island community engagement project that uses STEM technologies to facilitate the participation of disabled and neurodivergent communities in climate action. Led by AlanJames Burns, together with Creative Ireland, DCU and Research Ireland, the project advocates for a just transition while breaking down stigmas around neurodiversity and disability in the process.
Climate change disproportionately affects disabled communities through eco-ableism, lack of accessible information, physical vulnerabilities in extreme weather events, increased sensitivity in heat waves due to critical medications, and lack of access funding in climate action projects, to name a few. People with lived experience of disability bring vital skills needed to address the climate crisis, including resilience, resourcefulness, and specialised knowledge for navigating a world of obstacles. Individuals with neurodiversity also offer creative, non-linear thinking that could greatly enhance climate mitigation strategies—though they remain largely excluded from climate action efforts.
In phase 1 of the project concentrated on the wide spectrum of disability across 4 locations.
From urban perspectives in Waterford to rural insights in Cavan and the unique challenges of island life on Inis Oírr, each location has contributed vital understandings about the intersection of climate change and disability.
Here in these locations, we brought the artwork ‘Augmented Body, Altered Mind’ by AlanJames Burns. The artwork examines correlations between the natural world, neurology, philosophy, and neurodivergence. Immersed in a projected environment and multi-channel soundscape, visitors co-create the artwork in real-time by wearing a brain-sensing headset that detects electric signals generated by different brain waves. By doing so, audiences control evocative visuals reminiscent of environmental and neurological imagery and patterns.
We invited disability groups and climate action officers to private viewings of the artwork, which sparked interest and inspired important conversations about disability and climate. Our goal was to emphasise the need for inclusivity in climate action and to amplify the voices of those often left out of these discussions. The artwork served as a powerful tool for bringing people together, encouraging them to share their thoughts, experiences, and ideas. This helped us gather a wide range of perspectives. These engagements demonstrated the transformative potential of combining art and dialogue to address complex societal and environmental issues.
We have now begun work on Phase Two of ‘Divergently Together’, building upon the valuable connections and insights gained in Phase One.
The focus of this phase is to create a cross-border community of neurodivergent individuals from Cavan and Fermanagh/Omagh. We aim to find five participants from Cavan and five from Fermanagh/Omagh, bringing them together for a series of collaborative workshops that will run through Spring 2025.
The workshops will introduce new ideas, tools, and techniques to encourage innovative thinking, with themes exploring potential creative responses to climate change, such as biomaterials. The focus will be on amplifying participants’ experiences and perspectives.
Through the support of Research Ireland, Divergently Together will collaborate with a key neurodivergent community in Dublin. This will expand the project to include:
The funding from Research Ireland also supports developing a national presentation of Divergently Together in 2026.
Divergently Together is a recipient of the Creative Climate Action fund, an initiative from the Creative Ireland Programme. It is funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media in collaboration with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. The fund supports creative, cultural and artistic projects that build awareness around climate change and empower citizens to make meaningful behavioural transformations.
