-- Apologies for cross-posting. Please circulate to colleagues --
University of Cambridge
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
** Fourth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine **
On Thursday 4 December 2006
Rayna Rapp (New York University)
will speak on
'Making the invisible visible: the hidden history of families,
schools, civil rights, media and science in the production of
learning disabilities'.
The lecture, which doubles as the last Departmental seminar of
Michaelmas Term, will start at 4.30 p.m. in Seminar Room 2,
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane,
Cambridge. There will be tea from 4.00 in Seminar Room 1, and a
drinks reception there at 6.00.
At a workshop to be held the same day at 11.30 a.m. in Seminar Room 1
Professor Rapp will introduce a discussion of 'Reverberations:
gender, generation and social reproduction in the life course of
families with children with disabilities'. A paper will be available
soon.
If you would like to join us for dinner (and pay for yours) at 7.00
p.m., at Asia on Regent Street, please email Nick Hopwood
([log in to unmask]) by 2.00 p.m. on Tuesday December 2.
Supported by the Wellcome Trust.
All welcome!
Lecture abstract
Two generations ago, there were virtually no 'LD children' in the
United States. Yet by 2008, they had become 15% of the national
student population. A series of remarkable institutional, legal,
scientific and cultural changes have coalesced over this period,
creating a sea-change in the American imaginary. Yet these large-
scale transformations often began in domestic experiences of anger
and desperation: the work of families with atypical children was
central to these developments. This presentation highlights the
unanticipated activism on the part of parents which helped to shape
new understandings of human variability and the hierarchies in which
social differences are embedded.
Workshop abstract
When parents fight for school-based services; or decide to produce a
film intended to make the social world a more accepting place for
their child, such experiences transform not only the lives of
affected youngsters, but the life course of the family, as well. In
our research on innovation in special education, we have been struck
by the density of such stories: often, a child's differential
development leads a parent toward new understandings, and from there,
toward frank activism and innovative choices in work and in community
life. Not all stories are, of course, positive ones: divorce and
family divisions also stalk families with children with disabilities.
This presentation examines the relations of gender and generation
that are stretched and sometimes transformed by 'a difference in the
family'. Our fieldwork brings us back to the most basic 'invention'
of anthropology, the study of kinship. We argue that the changed
shape of a life cycle for a child with a disability and his/her
intimate others has reverberation on the 'public intimacy' of kinship
and a transformation of the social world, as well.
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