Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing
The 47th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference organized by BCRW is entitled “Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing.” The conference will be virtual and sessions will take place over a period of weeks from February to April, 2022.
This conference will explore experiences of madness, disability, survival, and refusal through the frameworks of mad studies, disability justice, and artistic practice. Scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners will interrogate structures of medicalization and institutionalization, engaging in dialogue about the entanglement of psy-disciplines with colonial and nation-building projects predicated on scientific racism, misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, and eugenics. We ask how structural violence has both created maddening conditions and established the terms by which survivors are pathologized, criminalized and alienated.
Among the questions we want to explore are those posed by conference panelist Camille Robcis in her intellectual history of institutional psychotherapy, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (2021), specifically how movements that have attempted to decolonize and otherwise contest the practices of psychiatry can provide us with frameworks to understand our own positioning vis-à-vis “the permanence of extreme-right movements, fascisms real and ‘in our heads,’ still spreading and gaining force throughout the world.” We take inspiration as well from our Fall 2021 event with La Marr Jurelle Bruce, whose critical discourse about madness encompasses unruliness, radical creativity, and rage in the face of systems that have used the concept of Blackness as disability to foreclose the possibilities of Black freedom. Our conference dialogues will also engage calls for intersectional approaches to abolition and decarceralization address disability and madness, and the imperative to center the experiences of indigenous and Palestinian people resisting psychic oppression while living under occupation.
The impetus for this conference comes as we collectively persist while a virus has exposed structural violence and inadequacy of profit-based systems of care, and we are also confronted with increased ecological fragility. We are now understandably asking questions about the shakiness of human experience, and how to reckon with what might be called “unlivable states of mind.” War, ecological destruction, land dispossession, occupation and policing, precarious access to shelter, and confinement in a total institution are among the conditions that are maddening, and yet upheld by powerful schemas that place value on profit, property, and hierarchy over collective wellbeing.
Gathering together, we explore potential modes of healing. Like seeds we plant without knowing which will root, we pursue collectivity and creativity in order to keep living.
Un-Conference Program
Willful Subjects*: Decolonizing the Psychiatric Institution
Wednesday 2/23, 6:30 p.m. ET
Panel discussion with Liat Ben-Moshe, Emily Ng, Camille Robcis, and Lara Sheehi, moderated by Ann Pellegrini
This panel explores institutional histories of psychiatry, focused on anti-institutional movements, radical institution-building, and alternate approaches to psychic life by practitioners and clinicians challenging the use of mental health systems as sites of state power, political oppression, and psychic violence. Our conversation will thread together case studies from the United States, China, France, and Palestine with: Liat Ben Moshe, author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020); Emily Ng, author of A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (2020); Camille Robcis, author of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (2021); and Lara Sheehi, co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2022), reflecting on the power of collective imagination, willful subjectivity, and witnessing as forms of resistance.
*Title references Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects (2014).
Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America
The Roslyn Silver ’27 Science Lecture by Helena Hansen, in conversation with Beck-Jordan Young
Tuesday 3/8, 6:30 p.m.
Psychiatrist-anthropologist Helena Hansen will be joined by Beck Jordan-Young, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, to discuss her work in her forthcoming book, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America.
Dr. Helena Hansen is an MD, PhD psychiatrist-anthropologist who has used ethnography to study the introduction of new addiction pharmaceuticals. She examined the social and political implications of clinicians’ efforts to establish addiction as a biomedical, rather than moral or social condition, as well as the ways that neurochemical treatments may be re-inscribing hierarchies of ethnicity and race. She completed a feature length visual documentary based on this work, Managing the Fix, which debuted at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Her book Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries was published by UC Press in 2018. Hansen is also leading a national movement for training of clinical practitioners to address social determinants of health, which she and Jonathan Metzl call “Structural Competency,” and which is the subject of her second book, Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health, with co-editor Jonathan Metzl, published by Springer Press in 2019. Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America (UC Press, forthcoming), co-authored with policy analyst Jules Netherland and historian David Herzberg, is her third book.
She is the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Investigator Award, Kaiser Permanente Burche Minority Leadership Award, an NIH K01 Award, a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant, the NYU Golden Dozen Teaching Award, the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training Model Curriculum Award, and an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Mad Blackness*: Rage, Resistance, Refusal
Tuesday 3/22, 6:30 p.m. ET
Panel discussion with La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Kelly Baker Josephs, Théri Pickens, and JT Roane, moderated by Kaiama Glover
This panel brings together scholars delving into the myriad ways that radical black creativity confronts quotidian anti-black violence and its ensuing traumas. While exploring distinct life histories, geographies and bodies of literature/performance, the scholarship of La Marr Jurelle Bruce (How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind, 2021), Kelly Baker Josephs (Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 2013), Therí Pickens (Mad Blackness::Black Madness, 2019), and JT Roane (“Spitting Back at Law and Order: Donnetta Hill’s Rage in an Era of Vengeance,” 2021) demystifies and responds to generations of historical and contemporary criminalization of black rage, refusal, and self-possession with careful and complicated portraits of mad black personhood and art-making across the black diaspora. In conversation, we consider how to practice an ethics of defiance against a maddening logic that brands blackness as always already “crazy.”
Title references Therí Pickens’ Mad Blackness::Black Madness (2019).
Mad Mapping: A Guide to Create an Emotional Safety Plan
Workshop with Fireweed Collective facilitated by Antoinette Chen-See and Lilac Vylette Maldonado
Thursday, 4/7 6 p.m. ET
How do mad, disabled, and neurodivergent people center our liberation as we survive and organize? Emotional Safety Plans (Mad Maps) are documents we create that help us to navigate our emotional terrains, particularly as they relate to issues like oppression and trauma. In Fireweed Collective’s Mad Mapping workshop, we will explore anti-oppressive approaches to emotional wellbeing, as well as build strategies for coping with and transforming individual struggles, especially in the larger context of social injustice. Join us as we learn about emotional safety planning and explore what we need to feel supported in our relationships and communities.
The Art of Madness: Catastrophe, Memory, Desire
A panel discussion with Mimi Khúc, Jess X. Snow, and Mariam Bazeed, moderated by Vani Natarajan
Tuesday, 4/12, 6:30 p.m.
Three multimedia artists whose work forges pathways to healing amid trauma and grief will present recent works and reflect in dialogue about their creative processes. Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, “teacher of things unwell,” and editor of the collective hybrid book art project, Open in Emergency, which takes a decolonizing approach to mental health by asking “what Asian American unwellness looks like and how to tend to that unwellness.” Mariam Bazeed is a writer and performer, at work on a puppet show in collaboration with Jacob Nader. The project, which they describe as “part-exhumation, part expurgation, part exorcism,” re-members their long-dead parents, whose tragic departures and enduring presences follow Mariam through the most banal and extraordinary of their days. Writer, artist, and arts educator Jess X. Snow wrote and directed the film Little Sky, the story of a non-binary drag sensation who returns to their hometown to face their estranged father and the childhood memories that continue to haunt them. These artists will discuss their works and the questions that circulate among them with moderator, writer, and Barnard librarian Vani Natarajan, MFA Candidate in Poetry at Queens College.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all.
Events will stream on BCRW’s YouTube Channel. RSVP to receive links to the livestreams closer to the dates of the events.
About the Speakers
Liat Ben-Moshe is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist working at the intersection of disability/madness, incarceration/decarceration and abolition. She is the author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (University of Minnesota Press 2020) and co-editor of Disability Incarcerated (Palgrave 2014). Dr. Ben-Moshe is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For more: https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/
La Marr Jurelle Bruce (B.A. Columbia; Ph.D. Yale) is a cultural and literary critic, Black/black studies devotee, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarship explores and activates black expressive cultures—spanning literature, film, music, theatre, religion, and especially the art and aesthetics of quotidian black life. Winner of the Joe Weixlmann Essay Prize from African American Review, he has also published in American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Social Text, and TDR. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, was supported by Ford and Mellon fellowships and earned the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award. Now he is in the thick of a project on—and experiment in—convergences of love and madness. He sometimes calls it The Afromantic.
Antoinette Chen-See (She/They) is a multidisciplinary organizer, builder, and community weaver for the people. From coordinating and throwing qtpoc benefit parties with the Ships in the Night Collective for 8 years, to practicing in co-counseling and support team work for over 10 years, Antoinette’s passions include bringing people together in loving, healing and fantastic ways. As a Queer Jamaican American, Antoinette’s work is guided by the desire to create communities that move us closer to healing and liberation.
Dr. Helena Hansen is an MD, PhD psychiatrist-anthropologist who has used ethnography to study the introduction of new addiction pharmaceuticals. She examined the social and political implications of clinicians’ efforts to establish addiction as a biomedical, rather than moral or social condition, as well as the ways that neurochemical treatments may be re-inscribing hierarchies of ethnicity and race. She completed a feature length visual documentary based on this work, Managing the Fix, which debuted at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Her book Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries was published by UC Press in 2018. Hansen is also leading a national movement for training of clinical practitioners to address social determinants of health, which she and Jonathan Metzl call “Structural Competency,” and which is the subject of her second book, Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health, with co-editor Jonathan Metzl, published by Springer Press in 2019. Her third book, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America, with policy analyst Jules Netherland and historian David Herzberg, is forthcoming from UC Press.
She is the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Investigator Award, Kaiser Permanente Burche Minority Leadership Award, an NIH K01 Award, a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant, the NYU Golden Dozen Teaching Award, the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training Model Curriculum Award, and an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Kelly Baker Josephs is Professor of English at York College, City University of New York, and Professor of English and digital humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2013) and coeditor of The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Mimi Khúc (she/her) is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the managing editor of The Asian American Literary Review, guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health, and an adjunct. She is very slowly working on several book projects, including a creative-critical work on mental health and the university. But mostly she spends her time baking, as access and care for herself and loved ones.
Lilac Vylette Maldonado (she/they) is a community organizer and culture worker who identifies as a sick & disabled, neurodivergent, Two-Spirit, Chicanx femme. She has been actively organizing since 2009 around many intersectional social justice issues such as racial justice, gender justice, disability justice, LGBTQIA+ issues, and body autonomy and acceptance. They are an avid zinester who has written and created artwork for various academic and social justice themed DIY booklets. She is a co-founding member of and logistics coordinator for the Los Angeles Spoonie Collective, a grassroots disability justice group connecting disabled activists and artists to community organizing and education opportunities.
Emily Ng is Term Assistant Professor in Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a member of the RURALIMAGINATIONS project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Her work, ethnographic and otherwise, touches on madness between grammars of spirit mediumship and psychiatry, loss and cosmic reverberations of sovereignty, and political temporalities and aesthetics of rurality in China. She is author of A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (University of California Press, 2020).
Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. They are the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU Press, 2003; Beacon Press, 2004); and co-author, with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, of “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon Press, 2013). Pellegrini has published two anthologies: Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Danial Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press, 2003); and Secularisms, co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen (Duke University Press, 2008). She is founding co-editor, with José Muñoz, of the “Sexual Cultures” Series, at New York University Press, which she now co-edits with Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o. Pellegrini is a licensed psychoanalyst. They and Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou received the first Tiresias Paper Award, in 2021, from the International Psychoanalytic Association for their co-written paper: “A feminine boy: normative investments and reparative fantasy at the intersections of gender, race, and religion.”
Therí Pickens is Professor of English at Bates College, focusing on Arab American, African American literatures and cultures, disability, philosophy, and literary theory. Her books include New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2014) and Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke University Press, 2019), and the edited collection Arab American Aesthetics: LIterature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre (Routledge 2018). Her critical writing has appeared in Hypatia, MELUS, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Al-Jadid, Women and Performance, and The Journal of Ethnic American Literature, as well as the ground-breaking anthology, Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions and Defying the GLobal Language: Perspectives in Ethnic Studies. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, Diode, The Journal, Wordgathering, Squ** Valley Journal, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Save the Date, and Disability Studies Quarterly. Her original drama writing has been performed at the NJ State theater.
J.T. Roane is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research. He is the former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane’s scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, Current Research in Digital History, and Signs. His work has also appeared in venues such as Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, and The Immanent Frame.
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is especially interested in the intersections of politics and ideas. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2013) and of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in France (Chicago, 2021). She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently working on a new book tentatively titled The Gender Question: Populism, National Reproduction, and the Crisis of Representation.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/hers), is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program. She teaches decolonial, liberatory and anti-oppressive theories and approaches to clinical treatment, case conceptualization, and community consultation. She is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39), and the chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-editor of CounterSpace in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. Lara is on the advisory board to the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of the book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022).
Image Detail
Conference graphic adapted from a May ’68 poster reproduced in Camille Robcis’s Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (2021), sourced from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. It reads, “La Medicine Du Capital Ne Soigne Pas, Elle Répare Les Travailleurs” (“Bourgeois Medicine Does Not Heal, It Repairs Workers”).
