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"Two Opposite Ends Of The World": The Management Of Uncertainty In An Autism-Only School, Gil Eyal, Catherine Tan

gil eyal

How do individuals maintain a sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty? In research on medical uncertainty, sociologists often discuss the strategies health practitioners employ to control uncertainties relating to diagnosis and treatment. Over six months of ethnographic fieldwork at an autism school, we observed 75 students and 47 instructors, and formally interviewed ten instructors and four parents. While other studies on medical uncertainty have focused on controls over external circumstances, we demonstrate that another management strategy is for individuals to perform ethical work on themselves in order to adjust how they …