Passports to Adulthood, Strong Families and Good Mothers: A Critical Examination of Developmental Disability Discourse in Ontario Between 2008-2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates ways in which motherhood and family are implicated in contemporary policy and practice relating to adults diagnosed with developmental disabilities in Ontario, Canada. In Ontario, recent policy changes emphasize the importance of supporting families and stress inclusion, choice and independence as desirable and attainable outcomes for disabled adults. At the same time, Ontario’s provincially regulated developmental services system has been charged by families, journalists and government officials as failing to adequately provide for adults with developmental disabilities and their families, many of whom are said to be in crisis. Conducted from a feminist and disability studies informed, post-structuralist perspective, the current research explores how meanings associated with disability, family and motherhood make contemporary disability related policies and practices possible. More specifically, the current research was undertaken to describe developmental disability discourse in Ontario between 2008-2014, especially as it engages with conceptualizations of motherhood and family. Results from a discourse analysis of policy documents, interviews with eight mothers of adults diagnosed with developmental disabilities and Legislative Assembly of Ontario Select Committee on Developmental Services transcripts indicate that the disabled adult subject embodies discursive flows, tensions and contradictions. Belonging to a category of fixed, medicalized difference from a norm, the disabled adult subject is envisioned as legitimately unable to enact the demands of successful neoliberal citizenship; while simultaneously envisioned as deserving recognition as a unique adult human who should exercise choice and individual potential to approximate normative adulthood and successful neoliberal citizenship. This tension-laden discourse is made possible by and perpetuates gendered ideals and practices of parenting and a related familialization of care, thereby extending and expanding intensive mothering practices and expectations. At the same time, developmental disability discourse also makes it possible for mothers to draw boundaries around their mothering roles and make demands of the province.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".