Neurodivergent Youthhoods: Adolescent Rites of Passage, Disability and the Teenage Epilepsy Clinic [Hardcover]

As transitional healthcare becomes an increasing fixture within paediatric and adolescent healthcare, this book captures how normative, biomedical and psychologised understandings of youth development permeates social life.

1. Introduction; 2. Bridging Cultures of Care; 3. (Neuro)scientisation; 4. Cultural Scripts; 5. The Parentectomy; 6. Betwixt and Between; 7. The Paraclinical Workforce; 8. Dignity in Care

Shelda-Jane Smith is Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, School of Environmental Sciences, UK. She is a social scientist exploring the relationship between medical and environmental sciences and culture, disability, race and the human life course. She is the co-author of A Beginners Guide to Building Better Worlds: Ideas and Inspiration from the Zapatistas (2022).

Adolescent rites of passage are ubiquitous sociocultural processes that feature across all manner of social activity. As transitional healthcare becomes an increasing fixture within paediatric and adolescent healthcare, this book captures how normative, biomedical and psychologised understandings of youth development permeate social life.

Through an in-depth institutional ethnography of a UK teenage epilepsy clinic, Shelda-Jane Smith shows how the prevailing social expectation of transforming from a dependent child into an independent, self-sufficient adult becomes the organising principle of clinical care. Interrogating the everyday work of the clinic and the experiences of parental and professional caregivers, Smith explores how the move from paediatric to adult healthcare gets renegotiated in the context of severe and profound learning disabilities, questioning what happens to transitional processes when young people do not conform to the social standards and expectations of youthhood that are placed upon them.

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