Claudia Malacrida – författare

Mothers of children with Attention Deficit Disorder must inevitably make decisions regarding their children's diagnosis within a context of competing discourses about the nature of the disorder and the legitimacy of its treatment. They also make these decisions within an overriding climate of mother-blame. Claudia Malacrida's Cold Comfort provides a contextualized study of how mothers negotiate with/against the 'helping professions' over assessment and treatment for their AD(H)D children.Malacrida counters current conceptions about mothers of AD(H)D children (namely that mothers irresponsibly push for Ritalin to manage their children's behaviour) as well as professional assumptions of maternal pathology. This thought-provoking examination documents Malacrida's extensive interviews with mothers of affected children in both Canada and the United Kingdom, and details the way in which these women speak of their experiences. Malacrida compares their narratives to national discourses and practices, placing the complex mother-child and mother-professional relations at the centre of her critical inquiry.Drawing on both poststructural discourse analysis and feminist standpoint theory, Malacrida makes a critical contribution to qualitative methodologies by developing a feminist discursive ethnography of the construction of AD(H)D in two divergent cultures. On a more personal level, she offers readers a moving, nuanced, and satisfying examination of real women and children facing both public and private challenges linked to AD(H)D.

Mourning the Dreams is an accessible and moving account of parents experiences of grief and recovery after losing an infant during pregnancy, childbirth, or within the first month of life. Drawing from the sociology of emotions, health research and psychology, her own experience, and a range of qualitative methods, Claudia Malacrida finds that bereaved parents not only grieve their child and its unrealized potential, but often find their personal experiences are at odds with social forces and prevailing assumptions about the nature of their loss and how they should react to is. She explores the meanings parents create as they face denial, silence, and other reactions from friends, family, communities, coworkers, the medical community, and even within spousal relationships. She also describes the courage and creativity of parents who create and negotiate meanings that help them grieve, recover, and manage relationships.

Using rare interviews with former inmates and workers, institutional documentation, and governmental archives, Claudia Malacrida illuminates the dark history of the treatment of “mentally defective” children and adults in twentieth-century Alberta. Focusing on the Michener Centre in Red Deer, one of the last such facilities operating in Canada, A Special Hell is a sobering account of the connection between institutionalization and eugenics.Malacrida explains how isolating the Michener Centre’s residents from their communities served as a form of passive eugenics that complemented the active eugenics program of the Alberta Eugenics Board. Instead of receiving an education, inmates worked for little or no pay – sometimes in homes and businesses in Red Deer – under the guise of vocational rehabilitation. The success of this model resulted in huge institutional growth, chronic crowding, and terrible living conditions that included both routine and extraordinary abuse.Combining the powerful testimony of survivors with a detailed analysis of the institutional impulses at work at the Michener Centre, A Special Hell is essential reading for those interested in the disturbing past and troubling future of the institutional treatment of people with disabilities.