Culture Keeping and Raising a Child with a Disability

• In Event: 208 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Paper Session. Hard Times for Families in Hard Social Spaces

Abstract

This paper takes Jacobsen's (2008) concept of culture keeping in international adoption and applies it to raising a child with a disability. By framing disability as a social difference (not an illness or strictly a medical problem) and using the concept of culture keeping, the purpose of this paper is to expand narratives available to parents who are raising a child with a disability, push the concept of disability in the family beyond health concerns, and challenges dominant notions of disability as a purely a medical phenomenon and instead as a category of analysis.

Author

• Laura K. Mauldin, University of Connecticut