Le probl ème public de l’autisme dans la presse française

This article aims to study the representations of autism in the French press to the prism of the theoretical framework of public problems (Gusfield, 1981/2009). The corpus Defining, Counting, Arguing is composed of 326 articles of the regional and national French press (1988–2008), selected from the Europresse database. According to that press analysis, recurrent use of a common discursive background includes the following topics: the fuzziness of definitions, the sharp increase in numbers, the parent's scapegoating, the correlation behavioral strategies/biological causes/handicap (in a deficit sense), the rhetoric of efficiency and of France's backwardness. This common discursive background (Lahire, 1999) of claims is directly inspired by the writings of Schopler. The morality promoters (Becker, 1963/1985) simultaneously go on a crusade against the “psychoanalytical model” and for the promotion of a behavioral model represented by the TEACCH and ABA solutions and they carry this fight to the media and political arena.

Source: ALTER - European Journal of Disability Research - July 20, 2016 Category: Disability Source Type: research