Read on Twitter
This Thursday I’m talking about my work @McGillMedPsych Before the talk I’d like to share some of the brilliant ideas and scholarship that I’m thinking with in relation to the emergent and contested universality of mental health. Thanks to these brilliant thinkers (a thread). https://twitter.com/McGillGHP/status/1359169886820442122
The groundbreaking work of Dörte Bemme (2019) on ‘contingent universals’ - ‘concepts that are true and measurable until they stop working in the field, or until the parameters of “what works” shift to a new iteration’ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11013-019-09637-6 @DBemme
The fascinating work within STS and anthropology on standardisation and the always contingent nature of universality - folks such as Stefan Timmermans, Marc Berg, Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Sally Engle Merry.
Dörte Bemme and Nicole D’Souza’s (2014) work on the ‘historical, conceptual, & material infrastructures constitutive of global mental health’s “globality”’ – what is needed for mental health to “go global”’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1363461514539830 @DsouzaNicole @DBemme
Jijian Voronka’s (2016) sharp critique of the universalization of ‘lived experience’ and her thinking on the risks of ‘strategic essentialism’ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/648226
Andrew Lakoff’s (2005) work on ‘diagnostic liquidity’ – the classificatory practices that produce mental health diagnoses as ‘coherent and stable’, and ‘durable’ entities ‘with universal properties’ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-005-6233-4
Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) scholarship on how the conception of the human as universal ‘Man’ is an overrepresentation – Man represents itself ‘as if it were the human itself’ – something Wynter refers to as the ‘Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom’ https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf
