To read this content please select one of the options below:

Chapter 3 Sustainability and community: ‘The un-sustainability of the social model of neo-liberal globalisation and the speechlessness of the community at the periphery’

Sustainable Politics and the Crisis of the Peripheries: Ireland and Greece

ISBN: 978-0-85724-761-2, eISBN: 978-0-85724-762-9

Publication date: 21 November 2011

Abstract

‘The children we are dealing with, they are so damaged – their lives are so damaged – they are beyond repair!’ The Clinical Psychologist who said this1 went on to talk about a cluster of children with whom she had worked, children all from the same community, who had Speech & Language Disorder (S&LD), or (and sometimes both) Attention Deficit & Hyperactivity Disorder (S&LD/ADHD).2 What is remarkable about that therapist's statement, made casually, and at the same time a statement by a professional, is the insight expressed in the clause, amplified by the parentheses surrounding it and by and the stress on the word, ‘their lives are so damaged’, that these children's speech and language and related cognitive difficulties are not to be understood psychologically, at the level of the inner life of the individual child, but rather in a broader, holistic sociological context – ‘their lives’ as a whole. In other words that the speech and language disorders of children are to be grasped and understood by use of Mills’ (1959) ‘sociological imagination’ whereby we can come to see and to understand the recursive interrelationship between a person's personal biography, their private troubles of milieu, and the broader historical and public issues of social structure, only by comprehending both together.

Citation

Keohane, K. and Kuhling, C. (2011), "Chapter 3 Sustainability and community: ‘The un-sustainability of the social model of neo-liberal globalisation and the speechlessness of the community at the periphery’", Leonard, L. and Botetzagias, I. (Ed.) Sustainable Politics and the Crisis of the Peripheries: Ireland and Greece (Advances in Ecopolitics, Vol. 8), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 45-65. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2041-806X(2011)0000008006

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited