Lauren Berlant
Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist whose work on affect, attachment, crisis, and “cruel optimism” helps explain why people remain attached to systems, promises, or institutions that also block their flourishing. Useful for analysing public education as both a democratic ideal and a site of harm.
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Iatrogenic harm and the parent advocate: how school systems produce disability in the families they fail
The body keeps the account even when the institution refuses to. What the school system produced in the parent who spent years trying to hold it accountable is not caregiver burden — a word that belongs to the person carrying it — but iatrogenic harm: specific, dated, attributable, and fully known to the institutions that…