From medicalisation to riskisation: governing early childhood development

This study investigates the transformation of the regime of governing child developmental conditions in Taiwan. With the shift from a medicalised regime of disabilities to a riskised regime of developmental delays, early childhood development has become the primary focus of governance. Drawing upon a multi-sited ethnography to follow the process by which the ideas and practices of early intervention are imported and adapted to local conditions, I elucidate how and why the new subject, that is, children with developmental risks and their families, emerged with the concomitant re-configuration of governance. By using three riskisation strategies, namely, the truth claim of prevalence rate of developmental delays, mass screening with standardised instruments, and identification of risky families, child development is problematised collectively and surveilled individually. Within this new regime, every young child is no longer considered either normal or disabled but is rather located within a developmental risk continuum and subject to relentless medical and social interventions. While 'returning to normal' becomes the predominant goal of early intervention for developmentally delayed children, disabilities are increasingly enacted negatively and considered embodying an undesirable state of being. These changing delimitations and subsequent interventions have profoundly reshaped our understanding of the child, normality and disability.