Angela Sofia Marques Castela Filipe

ANGELA SOFIA MARQUES CASTELA FILIPE, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2020, to aid research and writing on “In Pursuit of Attention: Diagnosis, Values, and Social Encounters in an ADHD Clinic.” Exploring the case of a pediatric unit, the resulting manuscript “The Cares of Inattention: Diagnosis and Social Encounter in the Pediatric ADHD Clinic” throws fresh light on the ways in which clinicians, alongside children and their families, make sense of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Drawing on archival research, a combination of media, policy, and visual analysis, and clinical praxiography, this project explores how the diagnosis is made in practice and how its meaning and management are negotiated in the Portuguese setting. This exploration traces how ADHD came to be an object of care and medical concern and, at the same time, “a site” of social encounter and critique. In doing so, it addresses questions about the flexible boundaries and meanings of the diagnosis and, more broadly, about how we engage with matters of behavior, childhood, mental health, and school performance today, defined in terms of paying attention. Given the globalization of ADHD and the wider global turn in mental health, this work also offers an in-depth and uniquely situated account of American diagnostic psychiatry and psychostimulant treatments as they intersect local contingency and social history. From clinical practices and protocols of assessment to public––and increasingly politized––debates on medicalization and over-prescription, this account throws fresh light on the cares of inattention in everyday life and in the times of austerity and inequality.