Research Catalog

Title

• Inside the child's head : histories of childhood behavioural disorders / Jennifer Laurence, David McCallum.

Author

Laurence, Jennifer.

Publication

Rotterdam : Sense Publishers, c2009

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

McCallum, David

Description

xxii, 112 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

Inside the Child's Head traces the emergence of biomedical diagnoses of behavior disorders in children. It provides a new critical counterpoint to the kind of 'myth-or-reality' debate on childhood disorders. Social policy debates about ADHD for example, inasmuch as they are conducted around essentialist dichotomies of 'the biological' and 'the social', lead into a philosophical cul-de-sac. The authors suggest that understanding and acting upon childhood disorders lie not so much in elucidating grand philosophical and etiological questions, or in pinning our hopes on new scientific discovery of what is going on 'in the child's head', as in the historical possibilities of the present-day make-up of this 'inside'. The book provides an account of the historical contexts in which the biomedical and social bases for disorders have been formulated, showing that both sets of understandings draw on common phenomena and use similar instruments to reach their conclusions. Outlined are a series of formative locations whence particular and localized governmental problems to do with managing discrete populations rub up against fairly inauspicious technical solutions, focused on pivotal events in specific institutional and social spaces. These include changes to the spatial organization of classroom; changes in the science of policing social space; the war-time development and extended clinical deployment of the electroencephalograph; the hand-in-hand emergence of computer and cognitive science; and the effects of the computer itself on the way we conceptualize brain-space. The book treats the appearance of the child with behavior disorder as an achievement of various agencies of science-and-government, rather than an initial encounter for discovering scientific truths.

Series Statement

• Studies in inclusive education ; v. 1

Uniform Title

Studies in inclusive education series v. 1.

Subject

• Behavior disorders in children > History
• Behavior therapy for children
• Behavioral assessment of children
• Child psychology
• Conduct disorders in children

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-108) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction : inside the child's head -- Disorder in the classroom -- Conduct disorder the achievement of a diagnosis -- Psychological trama -- Future orientations -- The end of the problem as we know it?

ISBN

• 9087907001
• 9789087907006

OCLC

407008608

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library