Emily Frances Bailey

Following its condemnation in for the widespread violation of autistic citizens’ rights, the French government launched a National Autism Plan in an effort to “catch up” with the rest of Western Europe. The therapeutic interventions and programming prioritized in this plan contribute to an imagined “rehabilitative future” in which disability no longer exists as part of the broader human experience. Guided by State-level priorities, one special education program in Paris, France for non/minimally speaking autistic adolescents additionally diagnosed with an intellectual disability has imagined a particular future of autism in which autistic adolescents are equipped with the skills necessary to participate in a version of a normative, neurotypical future through labor. However, this imagined future assumes autistic adolescents to be passive recipients of intervention and fails to consider what they might imagine for themselves. The proposed project is therefore guided by the question: How are normative futures imaginaries translated, mediated, unraveled, and rewoven by autistic adolescents and those sent to dispatch said futures? Through 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this project seeks to amplify alternative conceptions of an embodied and relational personhood, broadening anthropology’s scope of what it means to be a person and to have a future.