The social organization of mothers' work: managing the risk and the responsibility for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder
Date
2012-08-29
Authors
Schellenberg, Carolyn
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Abstract
This institutional ethnography relies on observations, interviews, and textual analyses to explore the experiences of mothers and children who attend a women-centered agency in Vancouver, Canada where a hot lunch, child care in the emergency daycare, and participation in group activities are vital forms of support. Mothers who come to the centre have many concerns related to their need for safe housing, a sustainable income, adequate food, child care, and support. And like mothers anywhere, they have concerns about their children. While many of the children, the majority of them First Nations, have never had a diagnostic assessment for fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or for the relatively new umbrella category, ‘fetal alcohol spectrum disorder’ (FASD), a number of the mothers were concerned or even knew that their children had FAS. This thesis asks – how does it happen that mothers have come to know their children in this way? The study critically examines how FASD knowledge and practices actually work in the setting and what they accomplish. My analysis traces how ruling practices for constructing and managing ‘problem’ mothers and children coordinate work activities for identifying children deemed to be ‘at risk’ for FASD. In their efforts to help their children and improve their opportunities for a better life, mothers become willing participants in group activities where they learn how to attach the relevancies of the FASD discourse to their children’s bodies or behaviours. They also gain instruction which helps them to confess their responsibility for children’s problems. While maternal alcohol use as the cause of FASD is contested in literature and in some work sites it is, in this setting, taken as a fact. This study discovers how institutional work processes involving government, medicine, and education actually shape and re-write women’s and children’s experiences into forms of knowledge that make mothers and children institutionally actionable. It is only by exposing the relations of power organizing mothers’ work that it may be possible to re-direct attention to mothers’ and children’s embodied concerns and relieve mothers of the overwhelming responsibility for which they are held and hold themselves to be accountable.
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social organization of knowledge, institutional ethnography, nursing-critical inquiry, public health discourses and practices, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), fetal alcohol syndrome prevention, maternal child health, Aboriginal health, risk discourses and practices, policy - alcohol and drug