Seeking and Rejecting Certainty

Exposing the Sophisticated Lifeworlds of Parents of Disabled Babies

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2321764
AutoresJanice Mclaughlin (0000-0002-0652-5225, Newcastle University, autor de correspondencia), Dan Goodley (0000-0002-0660-5671, Manchester Metropolitan University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen42
Número2
Páginas317-335
Fecha de publicación2008-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSociology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0038-0385 • E-ISSN: 1469-8684
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0038038507087356
OpenAlexW2025099665
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas23
Referencias citadas36

There are many debates in the social sciences about the certain and uncertain nature of subjectivity and knowledge. Often these debates create competing theoretical camps, each hell bent on refuting the other (materialist-idealists; modernist-postmodernists; structuralists-post-structuralists; medical-social). These critiques often fail to engage with the social and material lives of human actors, particularly when those actors occupy positions of relative marginalization. This article pitches these debates in emerging accounts of parents of disabled babies, which have developed from a three-year ESRC research study. 1 We highlight the ways in which parents adaptively and strategically use and refuse forms of certainty and uncertainty in order to configure ways of living with their children.We suggest that parents are nomadic but also settlers in the journeys with their children, and that modernist and postmodernist analyses both allow us to make sense of parents' situated agency within particular social, cultural and material locations

Agency (philosophy) · Certainty · Epistemology · Materialism · Order (exchange) · Political science · Situated · Social order · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Disability Rights and Representation · Family and Disability Support Research · Healthcare innovation and challenges · Law · Philosophy