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"This vivid portrait of contemporary parenting blends memoir and cultural analysis to explore evolving ideas of disability and human difference. An Ordinary Future is a deeply moving work that weaves an account of Margaret Mead's path to disability rights activism with one anthropologist's experience as the parent of a child with Down syndrome. With this book, Thomas W. Pearson confronts the dominant ideas, disturbing contradictions, and dramatic transformations that have shaped our perspectives on disability over the last century. Pearson examines his family's story through the lens of Mead's evolving relationship to disability-a topic once so stigmatized that she advised Erik Erikson to institutionalize his son, born with Down syndrome in 1944. Over the course of her career Mead would become an advocate for disability rights and call on anthropology to embrace a wider understanding of humanity that values diverse bodies and minds. Powerful and personal, An Ordinary Future reveals why this call is still relevant in the ongoing fight for disability justice and inclusion, while shedding light on the history of Down syndrome and how we raise children born different"--

This vivid portrait of contemporary parenting blends memoir and cultural analysis to explore evolving ideas of disability and human difference. An Ordinary Future is a deeply moving work that weaves an account of Margaret Mead's path to disability rights activism with one anthropologist's experience as the parent of a child with Down syndrome. With this book, Thomas W. Pearson confronts the dominant ideas, disturbing contradictions, and dramatic transformations that have shaped our perspectives on disability over the last century. Pearson examines his family's story through the lens of Mead's evolving relationship to disability-a topic once so stigmatized that she advised Erik Erikson to institutionalize his son, born with Down syndrome in 1944. Over the course of her career, Mead would become an advocate for disability rights and call on anthropology to embrace a wider understanding of humanity that values diverse bodies and minds. Powerful and personal, An Ordinary Future reveals why this call is still relevant in the ongoing fight for disability justice and inclusion, while shedding light on the history of Down syndrome and how we raise children born different

"In March 1946, scientists began to track thousands of children born in one cold week. No one imagined that this would become the longest-running study of human development in the world, growing to encompass five generations of children. Today, they are some of the best-studied people on the planet, and the simple act of observing human life has changed the way we are born, schooled, parent and die. This is the tale of these studies and the remarkable discoveries that have come from them. Touching almost every person in Britain today, they are one of our best-kept secrets." --Front cover of book jacket

ABSTRACT Expansion of intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes has been achieved in part through bilateral free‐trade agreements. This process, however, has not gone uncontested. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica, in this article I examine a conflict over IPR in the context of a social movement against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). I focus specifically on reforms that have set the stage for the private appropriation of biodiversity, plant varieties, and other biological materials. Environmentalists have struggled against these reforms since the mid‐1990s, and during the confrontation over CAFTA they positioned "defense of life itself" as a key issue for the social movement. Activists challenged the legal constitution of seeds, biodiversity, and other biological materials as objects of IPR by ideologically situating life outside of commodity exchange and as part of the collective property of the nation.

Harry W. Pearson: Articles and drafts, 1956-1962. ; File contains the following articles and typed drafts, some are annotated, by Harry W. Pearson: 1. "The Economy, Economics and the Good Society", Bennington College Bulletin, vol. 30, no. 3, 1962.pp.1-4. 2. "A General Concept of the Economy in Society", n. d. pp.5-35 Draft is Incomplete. 3. "Local and Translocal Factors in the Development of Economic Institutions", n. d.pp.36-47. 4. "A Theory of the Economy in Society", n. d. pp.48-72. 5. "The Theory of Economic Organization and the Problem of Instability", n. d. 2 drafts. pp.73-77. 6. "Economic Analysis and Institutional Analysis", n. d.pp.77-79. 7. "Plan of Research: The Theory of Economic Organization and the Problem of Instability", n. d. pp.79-93. 8. "The Political Economy of Services", n. d. pp.94-108. 9. "Talcott Parsons on the Economy", 1956. pp109-122. File also contains:  Three annotated typed drafts of an outline of an introduction to a volume on economic sociology.  One untitled annotated typed draft of a paper on the methodological implications of the surplus concept.  One annotated typed page notes on institutionalist aproaches. (incomplete).  Two annotated typed pages of Harry W. Pearson's comments on Karl Polanyi's contribution to economic sociology.  One typed page titled "Round Robin in Search of 'Scarcity' Definitions with Non-Economists".  One annotated typed page of Harry Pearson's notes on existing literature on economic development.  One hand-written page on "Surplus" by Karl Polanyi, and,  One annotated typed page of Karl Polanyi's comments on Harry Pearson's "surplus" thesis.