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Do not worry: A psychologist’s figurations of the child in a Swedish advice column, 2003-2008
Linköping University, Department of Thematic Studies, Department of Child Studies. Linköping University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0968-5734
2018 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Psychological and psychiatric experts have historically been important for defining, theorizing and intervening in childhood matters. Their expertise has not only been disseminated through clinical encounters, it has also increasingly been spread via popular-scientific materials such as books, magazines and newspapers. Yet such material is often neglected in social and historical analyses of psychology and psychiatry (Thomson, 2006). In this paper I analyze an advice column published during the mid-2000s in the Swedish parenting magazine Vi Föräldrar (We Parents). In the column questions sent in by readers were answered by the child psychologist Malin Alfvén, a by the Swedish public well-known expert that has published several books on children’s development as well as on parenthood.Drawing on Child Studies and Science and Technology Studies, I show how there was a distinct lack in the column of childhood medicalization and parental determinism (cf. Clarke, 2011; Lee, 2014; Stearns, 2003). The psychologist instead “downgraded” the seriousness of the issues raised by letter-writers by framing these as transient, natural and rather unproblematic parts of children’s development.In doing this, the psychologist figured the child in four diverging ways that each could explain aspects of children’s behavior: the child as being one of several kinds of children; as going through phases and ages; as knowing what’s best for itself; and as being unique. To conclude, I discuss the implications of these partly noncoherent (Law et al., 2014) figurations for how to understand the circulation of scientific knowledge between the expert and the Swedish public.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2018.
National Category
Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-164066OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-164066DiVA, id: diva2:1410968
Conference
Science in Public 2018, Cardiff, Wales.
Available from: 2020-03-02 Created: 2020-03-02 Last updated: 2020-03-02

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Skagius, Peter

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • oxford
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf