RESUMO
How are we to understand the complexities of prenatal genetic testing across social and cultural worlds? Availability and uptake of this biotechnology is variable, deeply influenced not only by national frameworks but also by local regimes of value. We argue that these intersections of genetic testing and local cultural worlds must be understood as part of broader 'reproductive imaginaries', including everything from kinship, pregnancy and gender norms to children's links to specific community norms of national and cultural futures. In the USA, preconceptual/prenatal genetic testing is widely available, driven by a neoliberal market-based model of consumer choice. In contrast, such tests are far more restricted by bioethical laws and medical regulations in France. This article will examine how particular cultural and religious communities - primarily American orthodox Jewish communities - shape prenatal genetic testing in their own distinct ways.
RESUMO
Our article draws on one aspect of our multi-sited long-term ethnographic research in New York City on cultural innovation and Learning Disabilities (LD). We focus on our efforts to help create two innovative transition programs that also became sites for our study when we discovered that young adults with disabilities were too often "transitioning to nowhere" as they left high school. Because of our stakes in this process as parents of children with learning disabilities as well as anthropologists, we have come to think of our method as entangled ethnography, bringing the insights of both insider and outsider perspectives into productive dialog, tailoring a longstanding approach in critical anthropology to research demedicalizing the experience of disability.