Searching for a Place

This chapter explores the challenges faced by youth diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and their families as they struggle to find a place for themselves in their school system. Through school-based ethnography of a district on the East Coast of the United States, this chapter argues that the experiences of these students in the special education system is an example of what sociologist Ulrich Beck calls “institutionalized individualism”: People are compelled, through large and geographically dispersed bureaucratic systems, to think of themselves as decontextualized individuals rather than members of consistent communities bound by social ties. The students’ creative attempts to create consistency in their environments are repeatedly uprooted, leading to a worsening cycle of social estrangement and brittle emotional volatility. For many of them, the Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis provided a refuge: access to Asperger’s-specific classrooms that provided a sense of safety and a shared culture, characterized by the inventive repair of broken connections both material and social.