SPEAKERS.
Anne Lovell​
Social anthropologist, Senior Researcher, Inserm, France
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I am a social anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology and anthropology of science. My research has always concerned itself with how illness, health and notions of the "mental" are shaped within a nexus of culture, kinship, economies and other elements. In my research on how psychiatry and related disciplines come to "know", I use my additional training in psychiatric epidemiology to understand concepts, logics, and ways of knowing in the social worlds of psychiatric scientists. Currently, my research examines the shift over the last half century in psychiatric discourses of mental health and disease in Senegal, the ways they map onto colonial and post-colonial relationships between France, Senegal and the "global North" more generally, as well as how local and non-biomedical approaches to mental disturbances affect knowledge construction within psychiatric epidemiology and critical psychiatry.
​Livia Velpry
Sociologist and demographer, Lecturer in Sociology, Paris 8 University
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Livia Velpry has conducted research on mental health for more than ten years. In the framework of her first work devoted to the social experience of mental illness, she studied the care of serious mental disorders in France from the angle of the patient-professional relationship and of the experience of the disease. Her many collaborations with professionals in psychiatry led her to become interested in the emergence of psychotic disorders then in violence issues in psychiatry – approached from the angle of the victimization of persons with mental disorders and from that of difficult situations in hospital wards – and of closed psychiatric wards. Since 2013, she has co-facilitated a multidisciplinary research program, CONTRAST, funded by the ANR, which deals with the reshaping of the regulations of the constraining dimension of care in mental health.
Clara Han
Social anthropologist, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University
My research is concerned with the study of violence, care, affliction and everyday life. What are the ways in which people give expression to the fragility and precariousness of life and lives? How can anthropology hone concepts from these everyday efforts at expression? What are the perils and achievements in everyday life, and how does anthropology attune to them? What is it to endure the deaths of others, close and distant, and what are the limits of endurance? These questions have emerged for me through my relationship with ethnographic sites - in particular, low-income neighbourhoods in Santiago, Chile where I have worked for several years.
Alain Ehrenberg​
Sociologist, Research Fellow, CNRS / Director of the French National Mental Health Council
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My research focuses on the transformations of freedom and equality produced by the values and standards of autonomy through the vast field of 'mental health'. It aims to clarify the new articulations between 'the common' and 'the each' in a form of life impregnated by collective representations of autonomy.
After having worked on the rise of a new culture of mental suffering and the new ways of acting and enduring in society through the lens of depression, my research then evolved to a comparative approach on social malaise in the US and France. A book on cognitive neuroscience as a social phenomenon is in progress. It tackles the neuroscientific version of the autonomous condition through another broad canonical topic: the opposition between biological and social factors.
​Samuel Lézé
Sociologist, Associate professor, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
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My research interests focuses on mental health issues. I coordinate the development of research program 'Telling mental health today' in the Maison des sciences de l'homme. This research program is devoted to the study of disorders of social ties ('deviances', 'suffering', 'dependencies', 'risk') and legitimate ways in telling mental health today.
Catherine Campbell
Community Health Psychologist, Professor and Director of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics.
I'm a community health psychologist with a particular interest in the community-level determinants of health, and the potential for various forms of grassroots community participation to enhance health and well-being in marginalised communities - particularly in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in less affluent countries.
My interests have been heavily shaped by my South African origins, growing up in a turbulent period of the country's history, characterised by social inequality, political conflict and rapid social change. With the Organisation of Appropriate Social Services (OASSSA), an anti-apartheid mental health organisation in Durban, I worked both as a researcher into the impact of apartheid and poverty on family life, and as a psychologist counselling political activists who had suffered torture in police detention. This work shaped what have since become the central preoccupations of my professional life, namely: to understand how people can work together to resist the impact of negative social settings on their well-being, and to transform social relations that place their health at risk; and to understand the pathways between participation in collective action and health.
​China Mills
Lecturer in Critical Educational Psychology, University of Sheffield
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China explores the psycho-political effects of the globalisation of the psy-disciplines, the medications and mentalities they elicit, and how they shape our very understandings of ourselves and of the social conditions in which our lives are embedded. She is interested in exploring how the psy-disciplines and psychotropic drugs function in local and global contexts of entrenched inequality, chronic poverty, (neo)colonial oppression, and increasingly under the politics of austerity. China published the book ‘Decolonizing Global Mental Health: the Psychiatrization of the Majority World’ (Routledge), which draws on research with NGOs and user-survivor organisations in India, and analyses global mental health policies as forms of colonial discourse. She has since published work on the mental health-poverty nexus, mental health and international development, and on poverty, stigma and social isolation.