Convenors
Luca Sterchele, University of Turin
luca.sterchele@unito.it
luca.sterchele@unipd.it
Fabio Bertoni, University of Lisboa
fabio.bertoni@ics.ulisboa.pt
Nowadays, there has been a «discursive expolosion» surrounding mental health, disability, and neurodivergence resulting in a wide array of heterogeneous narratives and representations in public and academic debates. Particularly on digital platforms, we witness a rise in content focused on «positivity» and the reversal of stigma. These can certainly be seen as an incursion into the political sphere by mad/crip activism; however, it is important to recognize how (part of) these discourses could be absorbed into a neoliberal framework. In a context of performative and extractivist logic, mad/crip/neurodivergent positivity risks becoming yet another tool that decrees the «salvation» of those with the resources to fit into the framework of «diversity» valorisation, while leading to processes of «monstrification» towards those who deviate from this construction of subjectivity.
Central in operating this differentiation is the role of expert knowledge. Althrough mental health, disability, and neurodivergence remain still framed within a predominantly biomedical paradigm, a range of technical figures are intervening in the construction of categories and the «take charge of users». An archipelago of expert knowledges – social workers, legal actors, tutors, educational services, (former) patients who take on roles as «expert users», NGO volunteers – thus intervene in identity and relational constructions, defining life trajectories, producing spaces and services that inherently navigate the constitutive ambiguity between care and control, treatment and neglect. Among these are the social sciences, both in their production of knowledge and in providing tools for social care practices. They contribute to defining, identifying, classifying, and quantifying the users, positioning them within the grids of «deserving/appropriate» vs «irrecoverable» patient, «rehabilitable» vs excluded.
The current configuration, resulting from the dismantling of national social protection systems in the wake of austerity policies and the shift of responsibility to the private sector, represents only the latest phase in a long-standing process of differential inclusion and exclusion, deeply embedded in the very structure of social welfare and the State itself.
Ethnographic practice highlights power structures, fostering critical reflection on the role of social work and expert knowledges. This approach challenges established institutions and models while also situating the processes surrounding care and treatment within relationships, contexts, and everyday tactics.
We invite contributions that address mental health, disability, and neurodivergence, within and beyond the care/control binary. We ask what is the role of «expert knowledges» – considered in their singularity or intersections – in the construction of subjectivities, in the production of vulnerability, and in the processes of distinction and fragmentation of the user base; and how practices of subtraction or resistance to such devices configure.
Open questions
- What processes shape the construction of meaning around the categories of vulnerability and fragility (across disability, neurodivergence, and mental health), and how these categories influence the social work in taking charge and managing users?
- How can an ethnographic critique of concepts such as paternalism and pietism in social welfare be framed, starting from practices of care, control, neglect, and treatment?
- How do practices of distinction within social services (broadly defined) emerge between the «deserving» user and the «problematic» user, and how do these distinctions—simultaneously practical, organizational, and moral—affect the balance between care and control?
- How does the relationship between families, public services, and caregivers configure the everyday dynamics of care and control within a context of poly-crisis and dismantling the welfare state? How do the «third sector», humanitarian organizations, and volunteering intersect in this relationship?
- How do mad/crip/neurodivergent subjectivation processes unfold, both within and beyond medicalization and the framing of service users?
- What impact do social inequalities—based on structural axes of class, race, gender, sexualities, and others—have on the rationale of social services? How do these processes influence street-level bureaucracy practices, and how do they shape subjectivation within these systems?
- What forms of withdrawal and detachment from the controlling dimensions of social and clinical work exist, and what possibilities do they open up?
- What are the processes of spatialization of disability/neurodivergence/mental health, and how do they relate to social and clinical work? What are the geographies of these processes, and what do they add to our understanding?
References
Barnes, M., Prior, D.
2009 Subversive citizens: Power, agency and resistance in public services, Bristol, Policy Press.
Fassin, D. et al.
2015 At the Hearth of the State, London, Pluto Press.
Fixsen, A.
2023 «Fragile minds, porous selves: Shining a light on autoethnography of mental illness», in Qualitative Social Work, 22, 1, pp. 140-158.
Goodley, D., Lawthom R., Runswick-Cole K.
2014 «Dis/ability and austerity: beyond work and slow death», in Disability & Society, 29, 6, pp. 980-984
Montesi, L., Colestani M.
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2018 «Placing care in times of austerity», in Social & Cultural Geography, 19, 3, pp. 303-313
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Keywords
mental health; disability; neurodivergence; expert knowledges; social work; social control; politics of care.
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
social work; sociology/anthropology of health and illness; critical disability studies; sociology/anthropology of the body.
Convenors
Luca Sterchele is PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Padua. He worked extensively on prison and carceral circuits, using ethnographic methods and focusing particularly on the role of medical/psychiatric knowledge within the carceral archipelago. He is currently a research fellow in Sociology at the University of Turin, where he works on a qualitative research on Neo- and Trans-institutionalization within the mental health field. He collaborates with the Master in Critical Criminology at the Universities of Padua and Bologna.
Fabio Bertoni is a sociologist, currently a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. His current research project focuses on the construction of bodily-sensory normativity in urban spaces, through an ethnographic study of visual impairment in the cities of Lisbon and Milan. Part of his research concerns the intersection between the welfare state, private social assistance services, and volunteer networks in the field of disability. He primarily works with an ethnographic approach, using qualitative, visual, and participatory methods.