Valerie Harwood

Diagnosing Disorderly Children: A critique of behaviour disorder discourses

Valerie Harwood — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:42:35 PDT

Based on the author's in-depth research with children diagnosed with behavioural difficulties, this book provides a thorough critique of today's practices, examining:

*The traditional analyses of behavioural disorders and the making of disorderly children *The influence of the 'expert knowledge' on behavioural disorders and its influence on schools, communities and new generations of teachers *The effect of discourses of mental disorder on children and young people *The increasing medicalisation of young children with drugs such as Ritalin.

This book offers an innovative and accessible analysis of a critical issue facing schools and society today, using Foucaultian notions to pose critical questions of the practices that make children disorderly. Rich in case studies and interviews with children and young people, it will make fascinating reading for students, academics and researchers working in the field of education, inclusion, educational psychology, sociology and youth studies.

Biopolitics and the Obesity Epidemic: Governing Bodies

Jan Wright et al. — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:09:30 PDT

Biopolitics and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’ is the first edited collection of critical perspectives on the 'obesity epidemic.' The volume provides a comprehensive discussion of current issues in the critical analysis of health, obesity and society, and the impact of obesity discourses on different individuals, social groups and institutions. Contributors from the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia provide original, accessible, and engaging chapters on issues such as the effects on individuals, families, youths and schools. The timely contributions offered by Biopolitics and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’ to this highly topical area will be of interest to a wide range of readers, including teachers, education professionals, community health and allied professionals, and academics in areas such as education, health, youth studies, social work and psychology.

Neither good nor useful: Looking ad vivum in children's assessments of fat and healthy boides

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:23:22 PDT

Fat bodies are not, fait accompli, bad. Yet in our international research we found overwhelmingly that fat functioned as a marker to indicate health or lack of health. A body with fat was simply and conclusively unhealthy. This paper reports on how this unbalanced view of fat was tied to assessments of healthy bodies that were achieved by the act of looking. Despite the efforts of health education in each of the three countries in our study, children and young people cited the act of looking at bodies to assess health and when they did they arrived at the conclusion that fat on bodies is unmistakably bad. The paper uses a Foucauldian analysis of medical perception together with material from Conrad Gessner’s sixteenth century Historia Animalium to outline how the children in our study placed great reliance on information about fat to make almost exclusively visual assessments of health. The paper makes the case that, despite a great deal of health education in schools, these judgments reveal a tendency for children to make incorrect assessments of health.

Subject to Scrutiny: Taking Foucauldian Genealogy to Narratives of Youth Oppression

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:57 PDT

This chapter sets out to critically analyze the emergence of psychopathologized queer youth and Fergusson et al.'s (1999) declaration that conduct disorder is more prevalent in GLB young people. I employ the term psychopathologized queer youth to describe the practices that configure youth sexual and gender non-normativity as psychopathological. Drawing on Seidman's statement that "Queers are not united by a unitary identity but only by their opposition to disciplining, normalizing social forces" (1993, 133), the word queer is used in this chapter to signify the sexual and gender identities configured as non-normative by these discourses of psychopathology. The term "psychopathologized queer youth" is thus deployed in a critical sense to indicate the ways in which discourses of psychopathology construct the notion of non-normative sexual and/or gender identities as psychopathological.

Studying Schools with an Ethic of Discomfort

Valerie Harwood et al. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:56 PDT

This chapter sets out a way of interrogating the familiar in schooling through the application of an ethics of discomfort. To do this we draw on research related to a study of people in Australia and the United States who work to support LGBTI identified students in high school settings (Rasmussen, 2003). An ethics of discomfort is used to consider one of the findings of this research, that is, the tendency to conflate LGBTI adolescence with woundedness in educational discourses. First, we elaborate on how we conceive of Foucault's ethics of discomfort and consider how this ethics can be informed by his suggestion that "everything is dangerous" (Foucault, 1997c: 256). Here we suggest that these two Foucaultian notions can be employed to inform the study of schoolings' poorly known horizons. To illustrate this point we analyze "horror stories" produced in relation to LGBTI adolesence. We then discuss how an ethics of discomfort can be applied to an interrogation of these "horror stories" by scrutinizing repetition and thaumaturgy as processes that make the poorly known comfortable.

Representations of autism in Australian print media

Sandra C. Jones et al. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:53 PDT

The mass media provides a frame for discourse around important health issues, and it has been widely demonstrated that the development and reinforcement of stereotypes of minority groups are strongly influenced by the news and entertainment media. An extensive search of academic databases failed to locate any studies which examined the representation of autism in the news media, although there were a number of articles on the media role in the autism and MMR debate. This paper reports on an examination of the extent, and nature, of coverage of 'autism spectrum disorders' in the Australian print media between 1996 and 2005. Key findings include a relatively limited amount of factual information and a dual stereotype of people labeled as having autism as either dangerous anduncontrollable or unloved and poorly treated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the nature and tone of this coverage of autism and its potential impact on individuals described as 'autistic', their families and carers and the community in general.

The place of immagination in inclusive pedagogy: thinking with Maxine Greene and Hannah Arendt

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:52 PDT

Conceptualising difference is a key task for inclusive pedagogy, and vital to the politics of inclusion. My purpose in this paper is to consider the place that imagination has in helping us to conceptualise difference, and to argue that imagination has a key part to play in inclusive pedagogy. To do this I draw closely on the work of Maxine Greene and Hannah Arendt. Arendts work provides a means to conceptualise difference whereby difference is itself at the very heart of what constitutes our humanity. Greenes work on the arts has outlined the value of the imagination, and has argued for the place of the arts in education and pedagogy. What is needed, however, is a careful account of how the imaginationis connected to politics. In this paper I take up Greenes call to `release the imagination and, drawing on Arendt, develop an account of the relationship between the imagination, thinking, and politics and how this can be used to argue the place of imagination in inclusive pedagogy.

Disorderly

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:51 PDT

Over the past thirty years the word disorderly has become increasingly linked to discourses of mental disorder. This change points to the effects that the social and cultural has in the production of ‘scientific’ knowledge of youth. Unlike uses in the mid twentieth century, the word disorderly is now medicalized, conjuring images of aberrant behavior together with psychopathology. Earlier depictions of disorderliness such as James Dean’s famous role as Jim Stark, the drunk and disorderly youth outsider in Rebel Without a Cause (Weisbart & Ray, 1955) were not underwritten with medicalized notions. Such representations linked youth with “out of order” behavior, attributing youthfulness with drunkenness and irresponsibility. The somewhat uncomplicated incorporation of mental disorder into the everyday is due to the creep of psychiatric concepts into wider cultural knowledge. From this perspective the production of disorderly meanings can be understood as cultural effects of medicalization and psychopathologization.

Political acts? toward the recuperation of opinion

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:50 PDT

Encouraging debate on inclusion and equity can meet with awkward silences, particularly across disciplinary boundaries. In disability studies, for example, it can be difficult to build dialogue with other disciplines; as a consequence, the different disciplinary groups within the field of education often end up working in their own ‘‘equity’’ silos. In this essay Valerie Harwood addresses this concern by drawing on Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on the importance of opinion together with Michel Foucault’s work on truth-telling and critique. Following Arendt’s emphasis on opinion and the political, Harwood makes the case that political acts in education require that we recuperate the importance of opinion and to take account of how truth functions in our contemporary context.

The New Outsiders: ADHD and Disadvantage

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:48 PDT

Recent research has pointed to the uneven distribution of diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, with disproportionately high numbers in areas marked by poverty (Gifford Sawyer et al., 2004; Olfsen et al., 2003). This chapter examines this issue of ADHD and social and economic disadvantage. Drawing on research with youth professionals from some of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia, the chapter puts forward the case that the ADHD phenomenon has highly problematic effects on the lives of children and young people in these communities. The intent is to show how the ADHD phenomenon interacts with disadvantage, and suggest how certain schooling practices that lead to the medicalization of child behavior have significant effects on people living in poverty.

Connecting the Dots: Threat assessment, depression and the troubled student

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:46 PDT

On April 18, 2007, a package containing over twenty digital videos arrived at the NBC building in New York city. Within a short time the material had been publicly broadcast, and images of Seung Hui Cho soon appeared on Youtube. Two days earlier the twenty-three year-old university student had been responsible for what has been claimed to be the worst mass shooting in the United States. Just days after the mass shooting, the Governor of Virginia, Timothy M. Kaine convened a review panel that was comprised of nine “nationally recognized individuals” across the disciplines of “law enforcement, security, governmental management, mental health, emergency care, victims’ services, the Virginia court system, and higher education” (Virginia Tech Review Panel, 2007, p. viii). Six months later the panel released the comprehensive Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech, April 16, 2007: Report of the Review Panel (Virginia Tech Review Panel, 2007). Together with detailed psychological analysis of Cho, the report issued recommendations for threat assessment in higher education institutions. Almost twelve months after the shootings, the Government of Virginia instituted four new laws: ‘Policies addressing suicidal students’; ‘Institutional crisis and emergency management plan: review required’; ‘Violence prevention committee, threat assessment team’; and ‘First warning and emergency notification system required’ §23-9.2:9.9,10,11; 2008, p. 28). Attending to key recommendations made in Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech (2007), the new laws included the mandate that all public higher education institutions in the State of Virginia establish threat assessment teams.

Scrutinizing sexuality and psychopathology: a Foucauldian inspired strategy for qualitative data analysis

Valerie Harwood et al. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:43 PDT

This article discusses a Foucauldian-inspired strategy applied to the analysis of the production of truths about psychopathology, sexuality and young people. Drawing on an interpretation of Foucault’s genealogical tactics, this strategy involves the deployment of four angles of scrutiny: discontinuity, contingency, emergences and subjugated knowledges. The authors discuss how these angles can be drawn on to scrutinize those practices that diagnose young people with behavior disorders—or that make essentialist claims about a young person’s sexual identity. Drawing on examples from their own research in education relating to the construction of psychopathology and sexualities, the authors consider how these angles of scrutiny can be applied to critiquing essentializing truths, and thereby inform the task of qualitative data analysis.

Performativity, Youth and Injurious Speech

Mary Lou Rasmussen et al. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:42 PDT

Young people may become disengaged from schooling in the middle years for a multitude of reasons. We consider the story of one young woman from the state of New South Wales, in Australia, who left school early, and consider some of the factors that contributed to her decision to remove herself from compulsory education. This young woman encountered injurious speech relating to her race, gender, sexuality, size and ability. In undertaking this analysis, we draw on Foucaultian theorizing of the subject and on the related Butlerian notion of performativity. Performative acts that occur within and around schools have the power to injure, to alienate and to potentially exclude students from access to schooling. This article details how performative acts may operate as mechanisms of exclusion, obfuscating the social conventions and institutional structures that invest them with power. Our analysis of how performative acts function in school settings concludes with some suggestions of how teachers and students might think differently about the production of their own and others’ existence.

In good conscience?

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:41 PDT

WHEN SISTER JEANNINE GRAMICK made the above remark she was commenting on the Vatican's attempts to stop her work with lesbian and gay Catholics. Her struggle to resist this silencing has been made into the compelling film documentary In Good Conscience, which has been widely shown, including in North America and London, and has recently been show in Melbourne and Brisbane at the 2005 Queer Film Festivals - and in Sydney for QueerDoc in 2004. Her story was commented on in the Australian Channel 7 news program Sunrise on 23 March 2005, where she was described as the 'nun who defied the Vatican' (Seven Online Network 2005).

Taking exception: discourses of exceptionality and the invocation of the 'ideal'

Valerie Harwood et al. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:40 PDT

It has taken a long time for the condition of being positioned as “disabled” to be conceptualized as an oppression, rather than an unproblematic description of the characteristics and functionings of the bodies of some individuals. Even today in the subdiscipline with which I am most familiar, political philosophy, a relatively abstract notion of having a disability still appears in writings concerning justice, desert and responsibility, as the paradigm of the sort of disadvantage people might suffer that is simply a matter of bad luck. (Young, 2002, xii)

Youth Culture

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:39 PDT

Youth culture depicts a form of culture that is distinct from "adult" culture and one that is marked by "youthfulness." Depictions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth cultures include bar and club scenes, raving, and cyberspace. Cinematic portrayals of these youth cultures include the Taiwanese film of gay teenagers in Boys for Beauty (China 1998), the film of lesbian youth culture in Go Fish (USA 1994), of queer youth culture and schools in Queer Geography: Mapping Our Identities (USA 2001), and the Icelandic film depicting gay and lesbian teenagers, Straight Out (2003, Dir. Hrafnhildure Gunnarsdottir and Thorvaldur Kristinnson). Other depictions of youth cultures include XIY Magazine, television programs such as the American version of Queer as Folk, which includes episodes showing the coming out of Justin, a white teenager; and Web sites such as queertoday. com and queeryouthtv.org. Scholarship specifically on LGBTQ youth cultures is dominated by North American authors.

Mobile asylums: psychopathologisation as a personal, portable psychiatric prison

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:38 PDT

Psychopathologisation, broadly understood as processes that lead to the effects of being psychopathologised, can have considerable consequences for isolating students from education. This can be especially the case for children and young people affected by the racialisation of behaviour and/or socio-economic disadvantage. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between the psychiatrist and the asylum in his lectures ‘Psychiatric Power’, the argument is made that these effects can be tantamount to being institutionalised in a mobile asylum. Portrayal of the asylum in the American television series House MD is used to highlight how, if we rely on classic depictions of the asylum-psychiatrist couplet, we risk missing - or minimising, the mobile asylum that some young children experience when they are psychopathologised in schooling.

Theorizing Biopedagogies

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:38 PDT

Across a range of contemporary contexts are instructions on bios: how to live, how to eat, how much to eat, how to move, how much to move. In short an extensive pedagogy is aimed at us: a pedagogy of bios, or what can be termed 'biopedagogy'. This biopedagogy is premised on a conflation between bios and health where there is far more at stake than simply 'being well'. As the chapters in this collection point out, the effectiveness of the 'obesity epidemic' in influencing beliefs, behaviours, and health and educational policies is very much tied to these practices that we are terming biopedagogy.

Telling Truths: Wounded Truths and the Activity of Truth Telling

Valerie Harwood — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:01:36 PDT

It appears that being young and queer seems to be all about woundedness: it means experiencing suffering, including the risk of suicide, increased drug use, homelessness and violence. Yet how are these wounded truths told, and further, why is it that people in education seem to tell them "unproblematically''? This paper considers these questions by analysing wounded truth telling in the recent debate over the Western Australia Lesbian and Gay Law Reform Bill. Using Foucault's (2001) discussion of Greek parrhesia (truth telling), the Western Australian debate is analysed in terms of its problematisation of wounded truth telling. Questions are raised regarding the implications of unproblematised educational practices that engage in the telling of wounded truths.