The research seminar « Maintaining / supporting: fragility as a mode of existence » will welcome

Myriam Winance

Et si les êtres fragiles étaient des êtres résistants ?

Hypothèses autour des enfants polyhandicapés

What if fragile beings were resistant beings? Hypotheses about children with multiple disabilities

Myriam Winance is a sociologist at the INSERM (National Institute for Health and Medical Research) in the CERMES3 (Centre for Research in Medicine, Sciences, Health, Mental Health and Society). Her research interests focus on how the notion of disability is defined in our society, on the one hand through policies and institutional arrangements, and on the other hand through people’s practices and experience. At the crossroads between a political socio-history of disability, sociology of health and science and technology studies, her work questions the notions of care, person, body and disability. She is currently conducting an investigation that connects the history of the political categories under which children with multiple deficiencies are designated and stories of families who have a child with multiple disabilities. Based on this twofold survey, she describes the different dimensions and forms taken by the “work of care” performed on a daily basis to take care of these children, interact with them, make them grow up… and correlatively how people involved in this work consider themselves and are considered –or disconsidered– as parent/child, child/child with multiple disabilities, child/special child, etc.

2018-2019 Seminar programme (and audio recording of the previous sessions)