Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America
Live transcription will be available here.
For this year’s Silver Science Lecture, in conjunction with the 47th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing,” psychiatrist-anthropologist Helena Hansen will be joined in 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.
Conference Detail
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.
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.
The event will stream on BCRW’s YouTube Channel. RSVP to receive a link to the livestream closer to the date of the event.
Image Detail
Gloria C. Swain, “Mad Room Demeanor” (2016)