Temanummer av Social Science & Medicine: The rise of developmental science: Debates on health and humanity

Alldeles nyligen kom Social Science & Medicine med ett temanummer på ämnet The rise of developmental science: Debates on health and humanity med en mängd spännande artiklar. Som redaktörerna skriver i sin introduktionsartikel:

This Special Issue aims to chart a pathway for the formation of a “critical” science of child development. Our “critical” starting-point builds on a genealogical approach: that is, the historical tracing of taken-for-granted concepts and theories of child development that arose in the post-Enlightenment era and that continue with us today

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Gregory J.S. Hollin & Alison Pilnick - Infancy, autism, and the emergence of a socially disordered body

Twenty academic psychologists and neuroscientists, with an interest in autism and based within the United Kingdom, were interviewed between 2012 and 2013 on a variety of topics related to the condi- tion. Within these qualitative interviews researchers often argued that there had been a ‘turn to infancy’ since the beginning of the 21st century with focus moving away from the high functioning adolescent and towards the pre-diagnostic infant deemed to be ‘at risk’ of autism. The archetypal research of this type is the ‘infant sibs’ study whereby infants with an elder sibling already diagnosed with autism are subjected to a range of tests, the results of which are examined only once it becomes apparent whether that infant has autism. It is claimed in this paper that the turn to infancy has been facilitated by two phenomena; the autism epidemic of the 1990s and the emergence of various methodological techniques, largely although not exclusively based within neuroscience, which seek to examine social disorder in the absence of comprehension or engagement on the part of the participant: these are experiments done to participants rather than with them.

Ofra Koffman - Fertile bodies, immature brains?: A genealogical critique of
neuroscientific claims regarding the adolescent brain and of the global fight against adolescent motherhood

This article presents a critique of neuroscientific claims regarding the adolescent brain and the sug- gestion that adolescent motherhood disrupts the healthy development of the mother and her child. It does so by presenting a genealogical investigation of the conceptualisation of ‘adolescence’ in Western psychology and the emergence of the problematization of ‘adolescent motherhood’. This examination reveals that antecedents to neuroscientific claims regarding adolescent immaturity, impulsivity and instability were articulated by psychologists throughout the first half of the 20th century. However, up until the 1960s therewas no problematization of ‘adolescent motherhood’ per se and adolescent mothers were only discussed as part of the concern with ‘unwed mothers’. Exploring the continuities and shifts in assertions regarding adolescence, this article highlights the complex history of some of the notions currently found in neuroscience.

Dominique P. Béhague - Taking pills for developmental ails in Southern Brazil: The biologization of adolescence?

In the late 1990s researchers in Pelotas Southern Brazil began documenting what they considered to be unacceptably high rates of licensed psychotropic use among individuals of all ages, including youth. This came as a surprise, since the vast majority of psychiatrists in Pelotas draw on psychoanalytic theory and approach pharmaceutical use, especially for children and adolescents, in a consciously tempered way. Drawing from a longitudinal ethnographic sub-study, part of a larger 1982 birth cohort study, this paper follows the circuitous trajectories of emergent pharma-patterns among “shantytown” youth over a ten- year period, exploring the thickly layered and often moralized contingencies in which psychodynamic psychiatrists' intention to resist excessive pharmaceuticalization both succeed and crumble. I juxtapose these trajectories with the growing salience of an “anti-biologizing” explanatory framework that psy- chiatrists and researchers are using to pre-empt the kind of diagnostics-driven “biopsychiatrization” so prevalent in North America. My analysis suggests that psychiatrists' use of this framework ironically contributes to their failed attempts to “resist” pharmaceuticalization.