For some time now, I have been volunteering at a local mental health clinic known as Foundry. One of the activities I have become involved in at the clinic is a weekly drop-in arts therapy group for clients. As part of my volunteer work, I have been shadowing Noriko, one of Foundry’s staff, in order to learn how to facilitate …
“Why does she like putting the glass bottle near her pee-hole? She couldn’t talk and tell us what was going on…what did she exactly want? What was in her mind?… [I]t was very hard to figure that out…but I had to keep working on this because we work with special children and we are special educators.”
Savita, a special educator …
The current clinical and social explanations of bulimia in the United Kingdom are based upon two premises: 1) that bulimia is a derivative of anorexia, and 2) that it is a hierarchically “lower” disorder, meaning that it is worse to have than anorexia. These explanations of bulimia revolve around the concept of “control” and conceptualize a particular bulimic “subjectivity.” By …
In a behavioural testing room of a clinical research facility, a well-dressed, white-haired woman is undergoing a battery of cognitive, neurological, and physiological tests. The facility, flanked by huge beech trees and set back from the road, was once a place for the severely mentally ill; known in the 19th century as a lunatic asylum, and later, a secure …
Attention, as you know, is the basic faculty, the mother faculty of what we commonly call intelligence. Those who play a role in education must, above all, provoke and capture that attention.
Costa Ferreira, 1920: 140
In this lecture addressed to primary school teachers, the founder of the Portuguese school of medical pedagogy, Costa Ferreira, called “attention” the mother of …
Scene 1: It’s Sunday afternoon, around one o’clock, and a group of a dozen or so people log onto a video call from their apartments. Occasionally someone’s cat will walk into the frame, obscuring the camera, or a deliveryman will ring the buzzer, interrupting the flow of conversation. But mostly, what we see of each other are scenes of domestic …