The article discusses the role that conceptualisations of child ‘imperfection’ played in the rise and fall of Russian ‘child study’ between the 1900s and the 1930s. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem’s ideas on ‘the normal’ and ‘the pathological’, the article analyses practices centred on diagnosing subnormality and pathology in the Russian child population in the late tsarist and early Soviet eras. It first examines mutually competing normative regimes that framed categorisations of ‘imperfection’ among Russia’s children in the context of the empire’s accelerated, yet ambivalent modernisation during the 1900s–1910s. It then charts the expansion of this diagnostics in the first decade or so of the Soviet regime, following its shift in focus from the early-1920s’ ‘delinquent child’ to the late-1920s’ ‘mass child’. The article concludes with a discussion of the emergence, over this same period, of the Russian field of medicalised special education known as ‘defectology’. It argues that defectology’s disciplinary specificity crystallised in 1936 around a purposely restrictive concept of ‘imperfection’, understood as individualised and clinically established pathological ‘impairment’. The latter conceptualisation became fixed at the height of Stalinism as a strategic counter to the expansive flux in which the diagnostics and conceptualisation of child ‘imperfection’ had otherwise been over the first three decades of the twentieth century in the context of the remarkable rise of child study during this period.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Nelleke Bakker;
(2015)
Identifying the ‘Subnormal’ Child in an Age of Expansion of Special Education and Child Science in the Netherlands (c.1945–1965)
(/isis/citation/CBB960963418/)
Article
Ben Harris;
(2021)
Eugenics, social reform, and psychology: The careers of Isabelle Kendig
(/isis/citation/CBB708695182/)
Article
Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala;
(2019)
Between Defectological Narratives and Institutional Realities: The "Mentally Retarded" Child in the Soviet Union of the 1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB577164168/)
Book
Margaret Porter;
Lucia Ferretti;
(1996)
Histoire de l'hôpital Sainte-Anne de Baie-Saint-Paul
(/isis/citation/CBB590786083/)
Article
João Pedro Fróis;
(2021)
Collecting to understand: the art of children and the medical-pedagogical approach in twentieth-century Portugal
(/isis/citation/CBB335954490/)
Article
Sabine Arnaud;
(2021)
Le sauvage, le sourd-muet et l’enfant ordinaire
(/isis/citation/CBB607441423/)
Article
Dimitris Anastasiou;
Sophia Iliadou-Tachou;
Antonia Harisi;
(2015)
The Influence of the School Hygiene and Paedology Movement on the Early Development of Special Education in Greece, 1900–1940: The Leading Role of Emmanuel Lambadarios
(/isis/citation/CBB958785907/)
Article
Jennifer S Kain;
(2020)
Standardising Defence Lines: William Perrin Norris, Eugenics and Australian Border Control
(/isis/citation/CBB364703336/)
Article
Michèle Hofmann;
(2019)
A Weak Mind in a Weak Body? Categorising Intellectually Disabled Children in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries in Switzerland
(/isis/citation/CBB864049337/)
Article
Katherine Sorrels;
(2023)
The Origins of Camphill and the Legacy of the Asylum in Disability History
(/isis/citation/CBB505919957/)
Article
Hyman, Ludmila;
(2012)
Vygotsky's Crisis: Argument, Context, Relevance
(/isis/citation/CBB001221630/)
Book
Maria Zalambani;
(2022)
Letteratura e psicoanalisi in Russia all'alba del XX secolo
(/isis/citation/CBB993623505/)
Chapter
Shumeiko, Larissa;
(2002)
Die Allgemeine Pathologie in der russischen, in der sowjetischen und in der nachsowjetischen Medizin
(/isis/citation/CBB000500683/)
Article
Hubert Larose-Dutil;
(2021)
« Full and Useful Lives » : La déficience intellectuelle au sein du discours médical canadien (1956–1972)
(/isis/citation/CBB764486626/)
Book
Jan Walmsley;
(2021)
Intellectual Disability in the Twentieth Century: Transnational Perspectives on People, Policy, and Practice
(/isis/citation/CBB899215958/)
Article
Annemieke van Drenth;
(2016)
The ‘truth’ about Idiocy: Revisiting Files of Children in the Dutch ‘School for Idiots’ in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB229608208/)
Book
Simon Jarrett;
(2020)
Those They Called Idiots: The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day
(/isis/citation/CBB273254107/)
Article
Laurens Schlicht;
(2021)
Connaître et éduquer l’« idiot »
(/isis/citation/CBB677445954/)
Book
Patrick McDonagh;
C. F. Goodey;
Timothy Stainton;
(2018)
Intellectual disability: A conceptual history, 1200–1900
(/isis/citation/CBB100608412/)
Article
Oertzen, Christine von;
(2013)
Science in the Cradle: Milicent Shinn and Her Home-Based Network of Baby Observers, 1890--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001253067/)
Be the first to comment!