This discourse analysis of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) applies theories of genealogy to trace the lineages upon which ACEs is premised and to theorize how, as a product of their continuities and discontinuities, ACEs emerged as a truth regime and contemporary biopolitics. I unearth the lost history of the phrase “adverse childhood experiences” beginning in 1948, a full 50 years before Robert Anda and Vincent Felitti were able to publish the ACE Study (Felitti et al., 1998). I highlight …
Read moreThis discourse analysis of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) applies theories of genealogy to trace the lineages upon which ACEs is premised and to theorize how, as a product of their continuities and discontinuities, ACEs emerged as a truth regime and contemporary biopolitics. I unearth the lost history of the phrase “adverse childhood experiences” beginning in 1948, a full 50 years before Robert Anda and Vincent Felitti were able to publish the ACE Study (Felitti et al., 1998). I highlight the significant contributions of psychiatrist and psychologist Sir Michael Rutter, the credited founder of child psychiatry; developmental epidemiology; developmental genetics; and developmental psychopathology. It was Rutter who first applied the pharmacology of “dose-effect” to measure “doses” of deprivation (King's College London, 2021), a methodological contribution that would become foundational to ACE researchand whose scholarship examined adverse childhood experiences and the protective factors of resilience nearly two decades before the ACEs studies – but who Anda and Felitti never acknowledged, instead claiming their roles as pioneers of ACE science. I then consider the
rise of neoliberal shifts that led to the emergence of the second revolution of public health, in which the Healthy People Initiative, the United States’ leading public health framework, characterized contemporary biopolitical strategies for the role of individuals in public health outcomes and called for biometric surveillance strategies to measure, predict, and optimize wellness and increase national human capital. My genealogy contextualizes these shifts amidst adjacent events, which supported the expansion of public health agendas and paved the way for the ACE campaign. I argue that the biopolitics of ACEs – a dispositif whose truth regime; multinational, multi-sector public health campaign; frame for social policy; global data gathering regime, and centerpiece of intervention strategies – contribute to its eugenic genealogical continuities and neoliberal distinctions.
