Attention deficit as a subject/object of exclusionary punitive discipline: Evidence from a school ethnography

Abstract

Re-reading Foucault's "The Birth of the Clinic" allows for a deeper understanding of analytical categories based on the crossroads between biopolitics and childhood medicalization. From this perspective, disorders constitute a paradigm of the medicalisation of childhood. The aim of this study was to analyse how attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) reorganises the discourses that classify what is visible and enunciable, enabling narratives of authorisation of routes and trajectories of in/exclusion in schools with high punitive disciplinary practices. We conducted a school ethnography in a school identified nationally as highly punitive. The results show how a medical gaze prevails that enunciates and makes visible the pathologised student's body and movement when these are disruptive. ADHD operates as a truth that assembles practices and places that organise student subjectivities and the punitive and curative machines of behaviour. We argue that ADHD medication becomes a practice of in/exclusion from school, which seeks to include in order to know, and to know in order to exclude, through the demand for medication as a requirement for permanence and participation in educational spaces.