Personal Information
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Given name: Liam 









Surname: Gomez-Pedraza









Email: gomezap.liam@gmail.com









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Your contribution
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Title: Preliminal Laboratory: An exploration of the neurodiverse ecosystem and its social implication









Format: Project presentation (2)









Main language: English









Abstract:
The Preliminal Laboratory is a transdisciplinary artistic research methodology developed in Puerto Rico since 2023, using performance, dance, and devising to investigate neurodivergent experience as a system of knowledge production. This paper argues that neurodiversity constitutes an endangered conceptual world: a minoritised cognitive and perceptual ecosystem whose distinct modes of attention, association, and embodied understanding are systematically rendered illegible by dominant academic and cultural structures.
Drawing on two completed performance works, Preliminal (2023), which explored ADHD and cognitive fragmentation, and Abismal (2025), which examined schizophrenia and anxiety, the paper presents the laboratory as a site where neurodivergent epistemologies are not represented but enacted. Rather than producing knowledge about neurodivergence, the methodology produces knowledge through it: using movement, liminality, and devising as instruments for accessing and articulating forms of experience that resist conventional representational frameworks.
Situated within a Puerto Rican colonial context, itself a political threshold, a territory that exists at the permanent edge of recognition, the project positions the neurodivergent body as doubly marginalized: a minoritised cognitive mode within a minoritised cultural geography. The paper proposes that artistic research is uniquely equipped to hold these endangered conceptual worlds open, giving them legibility without assimilating them into dominant epistemological frameworks. The Preliminal Laboratory offers a methodology and a set of documented practices for doing exactly that.











Link to the Exposition :  (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/4212612/4212613/0/0)









Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/250/SRS_0133.jpeg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Liam A. Gómez Pedraza is a Puerto Rican artist, researcher, theater director, and cultural manager working at the intersection of performance, dance, and artistic research. He is the founder and artistic director of the Preliminal Laboratory, a transdisciplinary research environment investigating neurodivergent experience, social discourse, and political life through devised performance. His work has been presented at the Teatro Julia de Burgos, University of Puerto Rico, reaching over 400 attendees per production. He holds a peer-reviewed publication in Revista [in]genios (Vol. 10, 2023) and a manifesto in Tangible Territory (Issue 9), and is completing an MA in Cultural Management and Administration at the University of Puerto Rico










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
This was a project developed for Masters Thesis. 














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Potential risks or ethical concerns:
None for the presentation of the research 










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