Suchergebnisse

Over the last three decades, an escalating portion of U.S. school children has been classified for special education; those with diagnoses entitled to services now number 15 percent of all public school pupils. At the same time, American scientists have focused increasingly on juvenile brains, studying what one psychiatric epidemiologist labeled ''social incapacities.'' This article reports on the laboratory labors of two scientific groups: neuroscientists who scan children's brains in search of resting state differences according to diagnosis and psychiatric epidemiologists who look to epigenetics to distinguish differential diagnostic populations. The article focuses on the medicalization of childhood differences and the harmonies and discordances between what researchers and parents understand to be at the root of children's learning and social capacities.

This article explores the reasons women of diverse class, racial ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds give for their decisions not to accept an amniocentesis or, having accepted one, not to pursue an abortion after diagnosis of serious fetal disability. The narratives of refusers reveal conflicts and tensions between the universalizing rationality of biomedical interventions into pregnancy and the wider heterogeneous social frame work to which women respond in their decision-making processes.

Judith Stacey's ethnographic investigations of women's domestic networks in Silicon Valley, Calif (see abstract in this section), raise questions concerning the relationship between women's experiences of domestic instability & abuse & their ability to transform or escape these situations, as well as the role of a feminist consciousness (or lack of it) in these struggles. Second-generation feminists (ie, postfeminists) appear more concerned with issues of personal choice rather than politics or wider social concerns, & take previous feminist victories for granted. This view is evidenced in data collected during participant observation at women's studies conferences organized by & for trade union women in NY. It is argued that future feminist gains depend on keeping past struggles part of a collective, rather than individual, memory & consciousness. Ways that the concept of postfeminism can help or hinder this process are discussed. K. Hyatt