Autism has largely been understood at the scale of the individual, using frameworks that emphasise autistic people’s supposed deficiencies and abnormalities relative to the neurotypical population. Such individualistic conceptualisations frame autistic disablement as an inevitable outcome of these “deficiencies” and “abnormalities,” neglecting to consider the role that socio-material environments play in shaping people’s capabilities. Yet, recent decades have seen the generation of a vast collection of geographical wellbeing research that seeks to investigate how wellbeing is experienced spatially, within the context of people’s socio-material environments.
Building off this relational understanding of wellbeing, the research presented in this thesis aims to explore how autistic young people’s wellbeing is both enhanced and restricted through their intra-actions within their neighbourhood socio-material environments. The research involved using a combination of photovoice, semi-structured interviews, auto-ethnography, and Foucauldian discourse analysis to investigate how autistic young people’s wellbeing was affected, both positively and negatively, within and across local and institutional landscapes. My findings indicated that: (a) neighbourhood environments that have “unambiguous” social rules and account for autistic young people’s sensory needs are critical to enhancing autistic young people’s wellbeing, (b) autistic young people’s wellbeing is dependent on the intersectionality of their autistic and youth identities with other aspects of their identity, and (c) institutions play an important role in shaping autistic “realities” – and thus how, as a society, we seek to enhance autistic young people’s wellbeing.
I conclude this thesis by arguing that autistic young people’s wellbeing must be understood as an inter-scalar process that is experienced through their intra-actions within their neighbourhood environments. Such an understanding necessitates moving away from medical-pathological explanations of autistic experiences in the direction of the neurodiversity paradigm, which rejects the notion that autistic people are inherently disabled in favour of a relational conceptualisation of autistic experiences. Within this neurodiversity paradigm, developing socio-material environments that are genuinely inclusive of autistic young people becomes integral to the construction of a just society.
- 9926478514101891
- Autism, Place, and Wellbeing: How Autistic Young People's Wellbeing Emerges through their Intra-Actions within their Neighbourhood Socio-Material Environments
- Franz van Beusekom
- Christina Ergler (Advisor / Supervisor)Gill Rutherford (Advisor / Supervisor)
- School of Geography
- University of Otago
- Master of Arts - MA
- Thesis - Masters
- University of Otago
- 2023
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- 2023
- no
- English
- Graduate Thesis/Dissertation