Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, Culture and Community Mental Health Speaker Series
鈥淗e has the 鈥榣ook鈥欌��: The social meanings and political effects of an FASD diagnosis
by Les Sabiston, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, UU直播.
This talk will be held by
Biography:
Les Sabiston is M茅tis from Selkirk, Manitoba, which is also known in Cree as Aswahonanihk (Place where you cross the river). He is an assistant professor of Anthropology at UU直播, teaching at the discipline鈥檚 juncture with Indigenous Studies. In his research and teaching, Les seeks to develop new anthropological frameworks from which to think of European-Settler encounter with peoples of the Western hemisphere, and to develop ethnographic tools and sensibilities that can perceive how this complex historical-political event is continually rehearsed and structured within various social forms of relation, individual embodiments, practices and patterns of reason, and habits of emotion and affect.
Current Research description:
His current work focuses on the myriad social, institutional, epistemological, and technical ways that the neurodevelopmental disorder known as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) has so readily become associated as an 鈥業ndigenous Problem鈥� across many social genres. From an ethnographic approach, he has been driven by the simple question of asking people how they know that another has FASD?, and then following the threads in which these judgments take form through individual, social and institutional meaning making processes. In his ethnographic fieldwork, Les spent two years embedded in a variety of institutional locations 鈥� primarily, his work took place at community outreach organizations in Winnipeg that were dedicated to serving clientele with FASD. In addition to being able to gain perspective from individuals who were designated to have FASD, as well as their families and friends, this fieldwork enabled him to have regular contact with social workers, probation officers, lawyers and judges, prison guards, landlords, and a host of FASD advocates who surrounded these individuals on an everyday basis and who shared various notions of what FASD was and how it affected these clientele. Les also spent a lot of time working in a clinical setting with a diagnostic team that consisted of physicians, psychologists, social workers, and speech language therapists. In his fieldwork he has found that FASD diagnoses are less than straight forward, and are often caught in an ambiguous state between the designations of 鈥渃onfirmed鈥� and 鈥渟uspected鈥� diagnosis. He has found that this space of ambiguity was one in which most social actors, from clinicians to foster parents, have learned to dwell, and that this ambiguity provided a productive force for capturing primarily Indigenous peoples within the diagnostic gaze of FASD. The paper he will be presenting today will try to make sense of this productive ambiguity.
Paper Abstract:
鈥淗e has the 鈥榣ook鈥欌��: The social meanings and political effects of an FASD diagnosis
In this presentation I will provide some ethnographic descriptions on how Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is diagnosed within a gamut of clinical, legal, and other social fields in order to try and make sense of how and why this diagnosis is tied almost exclusively to Indigenous peoples in Canada. With anthropological attention to relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada, this presentation will focus on the ways that this diagnostic travels between different social and institutional registers through shared cultural and political forms of apprehension 鈥� from the scientific measurements of facial and physiological dysmorphia, to legal and criminological modes of categorizing and accounting for abnormal behavior, to anthropological discourses on what constitutes Indigeneity, to everyday social forms of recognition in which Indigenous youth are both captured and expelled by domestic desires and familial fantasies of love. By exploring the social, structural, epistemic, and phenomenological harmonies that enable this diagnostic mode of apprehension to travel so seamlessly between different social registers and spaces, this paper also explores the implications of these anthropological claims for thinking about the forms of recognition and apprehension in contemporary projects of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada.
