Tell a story—about science shaping your life—and use our work so far to make sense of it.
Like What? Thinking back, I (Robin) realized that I was a fidgity, loud, easily distracted (Oooo! A shiny thing….!) non-punctual, chaotic kid. The nuns in elementary school knew exactly what I was: 'an ill-behaved child' who was not 'working up to his potential.' The appropriate treatment was time-outs, notes-to-mom, and occasional paddling. Today, I would be diagnosed ADHD and probably treated with Ritalin or Adderal. And the nuns can't paddle (by law). My life would have been different, for sure, but who knows how?
In High School, we heard all the time about who was and who wasn't 'college material.' My SAT scores proved that I was 'college material,' and I went to college (in spite of crappy grades).
This is science at work, naming, categorizing, measuring, diagnosing, and thus creating (socially constructing) things like bad kid / ADHD kid or 'college material.' Like all social constructions, they're absolutely 'real'; these decisions and labels have consequences; shape lives.
Carl Elliot would help by framing historically-local 'disorders,' and talking about the 'semantic contagion' involved in lots of articles about ADHD and child-rearing. Pinker would look to my genes (and my OC father and alcoholic but literate parents). Lewontin would insist that naming a kid 'disordered' (or not) changes him or her, and that the diagnoses mirror and legitimate already-present societal beliefs.
And most useful, maybe, might be Latour's account of the ways 'devices for seeing' (his Topofil, Munsell color code, technical names like 'sandy loam,' maps, theories etc.) literally make the mud and worms of Amazonia into 'facts' and data that can move around, that can be talked about, that take on scientific reality. The DSM criteria that define a 'disorder' also make it. Terms like ADHD or SAT scores don't simply refer to some neurological pattern in Robin's head (and body). They construct Robin (and all his fidgety friends, some of whom went to college).
So really: how did science construct you (or your family, friends or the world you live in)? Let your Science and Culture friends know about you. And explain some science-in-action. Use our readings to frame and illuminate.
Concepts and Issues—from our work (some of many; might help):
Big Ones: All societies have always had 'theories' of Human Nature (science) and these are active in creating specific Political Systems (politics). Always intertwined.
• determinisms (genetic, biological, cultural and so on)
• reductionisms (limiting our view to a few of many possible causes and influences)
• boundary work (ways science limits, defines, circumscribes)
• ideology (the world view that makes things normal, natural, common-sense. It's always 'political')
• technologies / seeing devices / instruments (tests, surgeries, therapies, names-and-definitions, measuring and seeing instruments, ways of talking or writing)
• 'blank slate' (or tabula rasa)
• 'ghost in the machine' (our friend the self or soul)
• noble savages or states of nature
• and with these three (above): John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Jean Jacques Rousseau,--and Ahnoald Schwarzenegger (they'll ALL 'be back'!)
• sociobiology or evolutionary psychology (as disciplines)
• neuroscience / cognitive science (also disciplines—CF: 'boundary work')
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