Project Details
Projekt
"Antipsychiatry" and the city. On the interrelation of psychiatry-critical practices, social movements and urban spaces
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Beate Binder
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419057548
This subproject uses the keyword "antipsychiatry" as a heuristic tool to investigate various psychiatry-critical initiatives and movements that currently represent and/or practice modes of dealing with insanity as critical alternatives to the established epistemological orders, treatment routines and/or classification practices of psychiatry. Different forms of psychiatry-critical interventions will be examined in their current articulations. To this end, the project centers the complex figurations of critique from inside and outside of psychiatry, including the ambiguous, contradictory and, in part, also paradoxical practices and arrangements, and their enabling and limiting effects. The aim is to grasp current practices and discourses of the manifold approaches to criticizing psychiatry beyond a dichotomous juxtaposition of critique and institution, and to correlate them with physical and imaginative urban spaces.To tease out the continuities, breaks and shifts in the field of psychiatry-critical interventions, the subproject relies on ethnography, and thus on a variety of qualitative social-scientific methods, and on genealogical analyses. Following a broad mapping, three case studies take up the methods of recording, questioning and document analysis to gain insights into how critiques of psychiatry are articulated as a field of knowledge and action, and how psychiatry-critical movements and initiatives are interwoven with physical and imaginary spaces of the urban.With this work program, the TP will enhance understanding of articulations at the interface of powerlessness/empowerment and the associated processes of de- and re-institutionalization. Given the blurred boundaries between institution and resistance/criticism, the structure of interactions and effects of "anti-psychiatry" (in the sense of a broad understanding of critiques of psychiatry) are to be made tangible as a normal#crazy constellation.
DFG Programme
Research Units
