medicalization

The therapeutic approach to social control focuses on what is wrong with the nonconforming actor. Objectionable behaviors get redefined as illness and illnesses get redefined as lifestyles. This session looks at what can be called "medicalization per se" – in Conrad's words: badness becomes sickness. We'll want to get a sense the generic process and of the potential problems associated with it. Later, when we read Foucault, the phenomenon will be situated in an historical narrative raising question of whether the progressive humanization we like to believe the "civilizing process" to have been is as innocuous as we think.

File nameFile typeSize
Medicalization and Social Control.pptMicrosoft Office Document1.98 MBInfo
medicalization.PDFPDF document24.74 kBInfo
SocCont-Conrad-on-Medicalization.pdfPDF document351.38 kBInfo