Recent Scholarship Roundtables prioritize faculty and graduate student engagement in current and pathbreaking research. These events provide opportunities for an established scholar to discuss their recent published work鈥撯�揳n article or a book鈥撯�搃n a cross-disciplinary setting. The format typically includes short interventions from two or three graduate students or faculty members, followed by the author鈥檚 response and a discussion among all speakers and the audience, moderated by a member of the SSoM department. Roundtables are open to all members of the university community.
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February 6, 2025听 听
(CNRS), to discuss Crucible of the Incurable: Facing ALS鈥� (Cornell University Press, 2024)
Crucible of the Incurable concerns how people face life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Anthony Stavrianakis spent a year in clinics and with people living with the illness in the United States. He examines the multiple meanings of care in a context of a chronic, degenerative, one-hundred percent fatal, neuromuscular illness, whose most common duration is between two and five years. How do people diagnosed with ALS continue to "live as well as possible, for as long as possible" in accordance with the normative work at the heart of outpatient ALS care? Crucible of the Incurable shows how those touched by the situation of a person living with ALS bear this problem and this task. Given the sense of certitude around the diagnosis, given past experiences of those aware of its usual progression, and given the uncertainty of the disease's cause and its progression for each specific person; how then do people orient themselves to the experience of life with this illness, how to support those who are confronted with it, and how to provide aid or solace.
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April 23, 2025听 听 听
, to discuss听Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness鈥�, Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus B眉schel, editors (Duke University Press, 2024).
Psychiatric Contours听investigates new histories of psychiatry, derangement, and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa. The volume lets the multivalent term听madness听broaden perception, well beyond the psychiatric. Many chapters detect the mad or the psychiatric in unhinged persons, frantic collectives, and distressing situations. Others investigate individuals suffering from miscategorization. A key Foucauldian word,听vivacity, illuminates how madness aligns with pathology, creativity, turbulence, and psychopolitics. The archives, patient-authored or not, speak to furies and fantasies inside asylums, colonial institutions, decolonizing missions, and slave ships. The frayed edges of politicized deliria open up the senses and optics of psychiatry鈥檚 history in Africa far beyond clinical spaces and classification. The volume also proposes fresh concepts, notably the vernacular, to suggest how to work with emic clues in a granular fashion and telescope the psychiatric within histories of madness. With chapters stretching across much of ex-British and ex-French colonial Africa,听Psychiatric Contours听attends to the words, autobiographies, and hallucinations of the stigmatized and afflicted as well as of the powerful. Expatriate psychiatrists with cameras, prying authorities, fearful missionaries, and colonial anthropologists enter these readings beside patients, asylums, and boarding schools via research on possession 鈥渉ysteria鈥� and schizophrenia. In brief, this book demonstrates novel ways of writing not only medical history but all subaltern and global histories.
Contributors. Hubertus B眉schel, Rapha毛l Gallien, Matthew M. Heaton, Richard H枚lzl, Nancy Rose Hunt, Richard C. Keller, Sloan Mahone, Nana Osei Quarshie, Jonathan Sadowsky, Romain Tiquet