EVENT DETAILS

Madness Afield: Rethinking Psychiatry and Mental Illness in the Non-Western World

This workshop will bring together scholars of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa to consider the question: How can studying "madness" in the non-Western world shed new light on the history of psychiatry and the experience of mental illness?

More specifically, the speakers in this workshop will discuss the insights that their research has revealed about the etiology, treatment, and adjudication of madness in countries like China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and South Africa – as well as the ways that their research supplements or calls into question biomedical assumptions about the nature and provision of mental illness.

By approaching the history, knowledge, and practice of madness from “outsider” perspectives, this workshop will highlight new conceptual and methodological approaches to understanding a disorder that remains just as contested as it is ubiquitous.

Schedule of Event:

10:15am-12:15pm

Panel 1: Rethinking Institutions of Confinement and Care

• Yumi Kim: “Madness in the Family: Relations of Gender, Labor, and Emotion in Japan”
• Claire Edington: “Re-Writing the History of Psychiatry as a History of Labor: The Case of  Vietnam”
• Zhiying Ma: “Madness and Ethics: Rethinking Care and Abuse through Confinement in Contemporary China”

• Tiffany Jones: “Ethnopsychiatry and ‘Alternative’ Psychiatric Practices in South Africa, 1930s-present”
• Emily Baum: “Embodied Minds: Psychiatric Debates in 1930s China and their Implications for the Present”

• Ramsey Ismail: “Not Working, Working at All: The Work of Social Withdrawal in Japan”
• Todd Henry: “Neuropsychiatry as Area Studies: Han Tong-se & the Diagnostics of Gender/Sexual ‘  Deviance in Cold War South Korea”

Questions? Email Professor Emily Baum at emily.baum@uci.edu