# Searching for Dwelling: Autism, Adolescence, and the Threat of “No Man’s Land”

## TL;DR

This paper explores how autistic adolescents and their families navigate coming-of-age challenges, focusing on the search for belonging and meaning in a world shaped by neuronormative expectations.

## Contribution

The paper introduces the concept of an 'intensified dwelling problem' to frame the existential challenges faced by families of autistic adolescents.

## Key findings

- Families of autistic adolescents face profound existential concerns during the coming-of-age process.
- The coming-of-age stage requires reimagining spaces of belonging and possibilities for becoming.
- Neuronormative and chrononormative expectations shape the challenges of misfitting for autistic individuals.

## Abstract

What does it mean to come of age on the spectrum for autistic adolescents and their families? And how might this transitional stage be related to phenomenological questions of dwelling? As part of a broader research project on family life, autism, and coming-of-age in Denmark, this paper explores the case of the autistic adolescent Leo and his family to illuminate how families with autistic adolescents experience and respond to the coming-of-age process. Engaging with perspectives from anthropology of autism, disability, and critical phenomenology including the notion of dwelling, the paper demonstrates how coming-of-age poses pressing demands of (re)imagining, and searching for spaces of belonging and possibilities for becoming in both present and future horizons. These demands are often negotiated and shaped within a world that is dominated by neuronormative and chrononormative expectations, where the dynamics of misfitting are seldom a question of chance. I argue that families like Leo’s face not only practical and bureaucratic hurdles related to coming-of-age, but profound existential concerns. They face what I call an intensified dwelling problem of reimagining and searching for ways to feel at home in the world.