Affective value and the significance of understanding disabled youth’s intensification of affects

This paper aims to bring to the forefront the mutual affective negotiations one young man with autism makes when navigating various social contexts having previously attended public school in Nova Scotia, Canada. In particular, I make use of Sara Ahmed’s specificities of affect (i.e. hate, fear, shame, disgust and happiness) as her work lends to accessing his sentient and emotive becomings. This is important as there is unfamiliarity on disabled youth’s emergent, affective exchanges with others. I argue that paying attention to bodily affects and how they materialise on the surface of the skin offers a productive space to understand better disability narratives. It is the intensification of affects that ensue for disabled youth that profoundly inform their discursive thought and future life trajectories.