Tracing Autism: Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience

by Des Fitzgerald

Overview

In Tracing Autism, Des Fitzgerald offers an up-close account of the search for a neurological explanation of autism. As autism has gained cultural prominence with more diagnoses and more controversy, its biological causes remain elusive.

Through in-depth interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, Fitzgerald examines what it means to do scientific research in the ambiguous terrain of autism research, a field marked by shifting horizons of uncertainty and ambivalence. He draws out how autism scientists talk and feel their way through their research, demonstrating its profoundly affective character, and expanding our understanding of what is at stake in the new brain sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295741918
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Series:	In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Des Fitzgerald is lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University. He is the coauthor of Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences.

What People are Saying About This

Elizabeth A. Wilson

"Beautifully written and lucidly argued, Tracing Autism shows us how to think in more entangled, capaciousm, and affecting ways about the social life of neuroscience."

Jennifer S. Singh

"Tracing Autism offers a theoretically rich and alternative perspective that departs from a critique of neuroscience to highlight how scientists 'move in, around, and out' with the complexities, anxieties, and ambiguities of autism neuroscience and the developing brain."

Nikolas Rose

"Much more than a study of the making of a specific diagnostic category, this beautifully written book helps us to understand the hopes, the passions, and the ambivalences of scientists at work at the intersections of neuroscientific research, clinical practice and personal commitment."