Call for Papers
May 3–4, 2027
University of Chicago Center in Paris
“Community” has become one of the most powerful and mobile concepts in contemporary mental health policy. Across diverse settings, community mental health (CMH) is invoked as a humane alternative to asylum-based psychiatry, a cost-effective response to scarcity, and a means of promoting social inclusion and citizenship for persons with mental illnesses. Yet “community” is neither conceptually stable nor politically neutral. Community mental health has taken divergent institutional forms across different national and regional contexts, shaped by distinct histories of psychiatry, welfare regimes, family structures, disability politics, and state governance.
This two-day international workshop, to be held at the University of Chicago Center in Paris on May 3–4, 2027, brings together scholars working on community mental health from comparative, historical, and transnational perspectives. Rather than asking simply whether particular models of community mental health “succeed” or “fail,” we are interested in how ideas and practices of community care are translated, institutionalized, and contested across different settings, and what these processes reveal about changing relationships among psychiatry, disability, governance, expertise, family, and social citizenship.
We welcome papers from anthropology, history, sociology, and related fields. We especially encourage submissions based on research in the Global South, as well as papers that trace connections and circulations between the Global South and Europe, North America, or other regions. Comparative papers are welcome, but papers focused on a single setting are equally appropriate when they engage broader historical or transnational questions.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
This two-day international workshop, to be held at the University of Chicago Center in Paris on May 3–4, 2027, brings together scholars working on community mental health from comparative, historical, and transnational perspectives. Rather than asking simply whether particular models of community mental health “succeed” or “fail,” we are interested in how ideas and practices of community care are translated, institutionalized, and contested across different settings, and what these processes reveal about changing relationships among psychiatry, disability, governance, expertise, family, and social citizenship.
We welcome papers from anthropology, history, sociology, and related fields. We especially encourage submissions based on research in the Global South, as well as papers that trace connections and circulations between the Global South and Europe, North America, or other regions. Comparative papers are welcome, but papers focused on a single setting are equally appropriate when they engage broader historical or transnational questions.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Histories of institutional and community psychiatry: What meanings and values have been attached to the idea of community in the mental health field? How have psychiatric institutions and community-based systems developed in relation to one another? How has deinstitutionalization, sectorization, decentralization, or other reforms transformed systems of care? Which policy and social processes drove these changes?
- Community mental health, disability rights, and social citizenship: How have disability movements, mad activism, service-user organizing, and changing ideas of autonomy and participation reshaped community services? How do human rights contribute to challenge, reshape, or reinforce community mental health policies? To what extent have advocacy movements and survivors been integrated into services?
- Governance, expertise, and care: How does CMH redistribute authority and responsibility among psychiatrists and other professionals, families, peers, community organizations, and state actors? How do funding, welfare provision, and security concerns shape the landscape of community services? How are community mental health systems stratified along lines of class, race or ethnicity, age, gender, and other forms of social inequality, and how do these differences shape access to and experiences of care? What sorts of regulations contribute—or fail to contribute—to the organization of services in specific areas?
- Transnational circulation and policy translation: How do models of CMH travel across countries and regions? What happens when concepts such as recovery, case management, psychosocial rehabilitation, peer support, sectorization, or community-based care are translated into new institutional and political environments? What role do international and transnational organizations play in the development and circulation of these models and concepts?
The workshop is designed to encourage sustained discussion rather than conventional short conference presentations. To facilitate that, participants will be expected to circulate a paper in advance of the workshop. We plan to publish select papers as a special issue or an edited volume after the workshop.
The workshop will be held in English.
Submission
Please submit an abstract of approximately 500 words, along with a brief biographical statement, by October 30, 2026. We aim to notify applicants of decisions by the end of November 2026.
In your submission, please indicate whether you would require financial support to participate in the workshop and, if possible, the approximate amount or nature of support needed. Limited travel support may be available for participants with limited institutional funding, but support cannot be guaranteed.
Please send submissions to co-organizers Zhiying Ma (zhiyingma@uchicago.edu) and Nicolas Henckes (nicolas.henckes@cnrs.fr) with the subject line “CMH Workshop CFP.”
