Linda Blum: Raising Generation Rx

In our latest 'Engaging Sociology' event, Linda Blum discussed the findings from her new book Raising Generation Rx.

Linda Blum is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, USA. Her new book Raising Generation Rx explores how the burgeoning diagnoses of children with social, emotional, behavioural disorders convey new cultural messages, revise notions of childrearing for an age of inequality, and compel mothers to take ‘personal responsibility’ for maximising their children’s brain development.

In her lecture Professor Blum revealed how mothers in widely varied households advocate for their children in the dense bureaucracies of the educational and medical systems and wrestle with difficult decisions about the use of psychoactive medications. She also demonstrated that an intersectional analysis is needed to make sense of mothers’ experiences of stigma and mother-blame.

Biography

Linda Blum is a qualitative, ethnographic sociologist who studies persistence, change, and contradictions in contemporary gender relations. She began her sociological career researching and writing on women’s grassroots movements for comparable pay, but has since developed another focus on ideologies of motherhood in the United States, how we judge fit and unfit, respectable and disreputable, and measure mothers against each other in ways that reinforce class and race inequality.

She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement  (1991, University of California Press);  At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States  (1999, Beacon); and  Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality  (2015, NYU Press).