Clinics and their Worlds

NOTE: This panel has been moved from APSA in solidarity with striking workers in Los Angeles. At check out, you will have the option to donate to the UNITE HERE Local 11 strike fund.

September 02, 2023
3pm EST / 12pm PST / 8pm London

Join The Psychosocial Foundation & Parapraxis for papers on clinics and their worlds.

"The clinic" is a political site because it concerns organized human suffering and its amelioration. With and against this basic insight, the clinic is also a crucial site of political theorizing because the tools of these transformations are themselves laced through with questions of hierarchy and identity. As Michel Foucault has argued, judgments about what it means to be "cured" demand political judgments: what is normal? what does it mean to thrive in a world with others? under what conditions does refusal to thrive indict the social world and not only the patient? What are the relations between sites of revolt and sites of self-making? How does the spatial imaginary of transformation change once we imagine intimacy and refusal to be co-constitutive? In this panel, alongside more manifestly clinical works, we will consider the life of this tension on a number of other sites including the workplace, the prison, the revolutionary assembly, the factory floor, the neighborhood, and the home, considering their relational logic and well as their material structure.

LIST OF PAPERS:

Kevin Duong: "Psychiatry for Internal Colonialism: the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, 1946-1958"

Hannah Zeavin: "Deprivation: The Origins of Attachment Theory in the Prison Clinic."

Nica Siegel: "Desiring Politics: Herbert Marcuse, Maladjustment and the End of History Thesis."

Begüm Adalet: "An Insurgent Mood: Politics of the Home in Lorraine Hansberry’s Writings"

Moderator: Benjamin McKean

Discussant: Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro

Tickets available here.