Christopher Chamberlin Fellow - ICI Berlin |
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03.08.2021-30.08.2021
Toward a Subject of Racism: Case Histories from the Psychiatric Clinic (1930-1970)
The goal of this work is to bring historical specificity to the development of the concept of racism and to explore its ethical and social implications. This project will achieve this goal through several concrete research objectives. First, I plan to spend the majority of the Brocher residency (seven weeks) researching and drafting the second chapter of my book manuscript (chapter tentatively titled: “The Globalization of Antiracism: From Clinic to Culture”), which examines anthropological, sociological, and psychiatric studies into racism during the 1930s and 1940s. My objective is to survey the outcome of these studies, the methods they employed to identify and treat racism, and their historical impact on the development of race and racism as a governing framework for democracy and international relations. Second, I plan to commit one week conducting archival work in the special collections of the OHCHR Library in Geneva. My objective is to generate a comprehensive account of the United Nation’s sponsorship of social scientific research on “the race question,” from the postwar period to the present, in order to track the subsequent development of the theory of racism, particularly to gauge the contributions French structural anthropologists made to its understanding. My third objective is to network with Brocher researchers in clinical fields (e.g. psychology, history of psychiatry) to discuss ethical and methodological issues around the use of case studies, particularly to discuss the implications of patient anonymity and case generalization. Fourth and finally, I plan to present a summary of my book project to Brocher colleagues in order to receive feedback, advice, and collaborative input on the manuscript from seasoned scholars across a range of fields.