In this at once biographical and autobiographical piece (cf. Shapiro 1988), I describe the processes of "knowledge-making" of one neonatal intensive care parent. In particular, I investigate the ways that narratives of linear progress informed my efforts to understand my son's condition and future prospects, that is, to engage in lay prognostication. In examining and comparing the three metaphors most commonly used to describe my son's changing condition-roller coaster, graduation, and course-I explore how the discrepancy between narratives of linear progress and the complex and volatile condition of many premature and/or critically ill babies is discursively managed in a neonatal intensive care unit.
Since at least the 1960s, science and technology studies (STS) scholars have distinguished between technological and social fixes. The author introduces a new concept for the STS theoretical tool kit—the cultural fix—and illustrates this concept using examples from her own research on pregnancy loss and neonatal intensive care, as well as that of anthropologists Katherine Newman and Sherry Ortner on downward mobility and unemployment in the United States. It is argued that the cultural fix represents a distinctive anthropological contribution to the field.
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