Call for papers
Résumé
Who Cares? De la psychiatrie dans l’aire anglophone is a group of scholars from Université Paris Nanterre and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Departments of English studies, CREA / Prismes) formed in 2023 and working specifically on the history of psychiatry in the English-speaking world. We are keen to encourage scholarly conversations on the subject and strengthen its international dimension. Our aim is also to foster further discussions on links and comparisons between historical perspectives on psychiatry in the French and the English-speaking worlds.
Argument
The history of psychiatry raises the question of its disciplinary breadth, which Jan Goldstein once attributed to the very nature of psychiatry, an old discipline somehow “lack[ing] the stability that age would seem to confer” (Goldstein, 1993, p. 1368). While it was originally written by psychiatrists and healthcare professionals (most famously, Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter), it also increasingly caught the attention of scholars in social, cultural and intellectual history, as well as historians of science and medicine from the 1970s-80s onwards.
The term “psychiatry” is to be taken in the broadest sense of the word, as defined by historian Roy Porter – a discipline which is “as old as the hills if we treat it as a portmanteau term for all attempts to minister to minds diseased” (Porter, 1990, p. 169). This approach is perfectly in line with the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, presenting psychiatry as the “branch of medicine concerned with the causes, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mental illness”. Though the term “psychiatre” was used in French as early as 1802, the word “psychiatrist” only appeared much later in the English language, in 1875, while “psychiatry” seems to have been in use since 1846. This does not mean however that the phrase “history of psychiatry” should only apply from the 19th century onwards, and it is entirely justified when dealing with any historical research on the treatment of the mentally ill. The case of Bethlem Royal Hospital (“Bedlam”) in London, that was founded in 1247 as a monastery, then transformed into a hospital and is still considered today as the oldest “psychiatric” hospital in the world, provides a perfect example of the existence of psychiatric practices even before the coining of the term.
Far from being a mere play on words, the polysemy in our project title “Who cares?” raises the question of the attention paid to the patient in the therapeutic relationship, or their neglect. Evoking the feeling of incomprehension, contempt or indifference that the patient may feel during therapy, it highlights the gap between the medical professional’s perspective, often focused on pathology, and the patient’s subjective experience. On the other hand, questioning the subject of care, it underlines the possible failure of caregivers to treat certain aspects of the illness, deemed secondary or negligible. It also questions the attention granted to the mentally ill and the respect (or lack thereof) shown towards them by the public at large, an attitude that is intricately linked to the perceptions and mentalities of a given society at a certain period of time, making it a genuine social and historical issue. What is more, the question “Who cares?” is intended as a reflection on the place, the role and the recognition of the history of psychiatry in the wider field of the social and political history of the English-speaking world.
The 2027 conference theme “Circulations & Transfers” seeks to contribute to recent historiographical work examining psychiatric knowledge, practices, institutions, material objects, diagnostic categories, and the people involved in their production, dissemination, and reception across borders and/or institutional and extra-institutional settings in the English-speaking world. Rather than viewing the history of psychiatry as a succession of isolated national traditions, this perspective emphasises the interconnected processes through which psychiatric ideas, practices, institutions, and experiences of mental illness have been exchanged, adapted, negotiated, and sometimes resisted.
Circulations refer to the movement of knowledge, practices, objects, and people across different spaces. Global historians of science have drawn on this concept to move beyond Eurocentric accounts by demonstrating that ideas and practices did not circulate exclusively according to a unilateral centre–periphery model (for example, from colonial powers to their colonies). Transfers, which may be understood as a more specific form of circulation, are processes through which a particular object, person, theory, practice, institutional model, or diagnostic category is moved from one context to another, often during a specific period.
In both cases, these processes may be understood as transformative. As Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam observed in 2006:
“Circulation is different from simple mobility, inasmuch as it implies a double movement of going back and forth and coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely. In circulating, things, men and notions often transform themselves.” (Markovits et al., 2006, pp. 2-3)
From this perspective, circulations and transfers imply that knowledge, practices and objects may be reshaped through movement, translation, mediation, and encounter (Secord; Raj). This stands in contrast to Bruno Latour’s concept of “immutable mobiles,” whereby scientific objects can travel while remaining relatively stable, enabling knowledge to circulate without being fundamentally transformed (Latour).
Applied to the history of psychiatry, these concepts have encouraged historians to move beyond national frameworks and examine the transnational dimensions of psychiatric knowledge and practice. Early studies explored the development of national psychiatric traditions (Porter and Wright). Since the 2010s, a growing body of scholarship has investigated networks, connections, and exchanges in the history of psychiatry. This work has examined the circulation of therapeutic models and treatments—including psychotherapy, shock therapies, and coma-induced therapies—and their adaptation to local contexts (Ernst and Mueller). It has also explored tours undertaken by psychiatrists and/or architects to study asylum architecture and practices of care at national and international levels (Ellis; Deligny and Malathouni).
Other influential studies have examined circulations and transfers within imperial settings, focusing on the movement of people, psychiatric practices, and institutional models, as well as their local appropriations and transformations in Africa, Oceania, and India (Mahone and Vaughan; Coleborne; Mishra; Ernst). It will also be interesting to examine how psychiatric theories and practices were transferred from Great Britain to its dominions and how they circulated first within the Commonwealth and later in postcolonial spaces. For example, at the turn of the 19th century in South Africa, psychiatrists trained at the university of Edinburgh in Scotland played a key role in establishing a mental health system largely modelled on British standards. In this regard, patient transfers were very common, in order to ensure strict racial segregation between whites only institutions and those for black, coloured or Indian people (Deacon; Parle; Swartz).
Questions of translation also form an important dimension of circulations and transfers. Foundational works such as Philippe Pinel’s Treatise on Insanity (1806), which mentioned the work of Alexander Crichton as a gateway to studies written in English and German (Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, 1800-1801, xxi, 81, 112) and Jean-Etienne Esquirol’s Observations on the Illusions of the Insane (1833 / Des illusions chez les aliénés, 1832 – see also Esquirol 1838/1845) were translated into English, but much work in German, and in French, the two languages in which many among the first texts on psychiatry were written, still remains unavailable to Anglophone readerships, including future professionals in need of a historicised perspective on the discipline (Park and Weleff). As argued by Jean Garrabé, uneven translation practices have limited the circulation of many psychopathological concepts (Garrabé). Studying the history of the circulation of psychiatric terminology helps explain how and why certain concepts were transformed, forgotten, or replaced over time. The development of psychiatry as an international yet Europe- and North-America-centred discipline has led to a dominance of English as the international language for communication in this field, which may explain why some key works have not been translated into French. This is the case of William A. F. Browne’s 1837 What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be, among others, despite its enduring value.
As scholars of cultural psychiatry and global mental health have shown, the global circulation of psychiatric categories has been neither straightforwardly standardising nor uncontested. The diffusion of the DSM sparked continuing debates over the universal applicability of Europe- and North-America-centred diagnostic frameworks, the medicalisation of distress, and the unequal power relations underpinning the transnational circulation of psychiatric expertise (Kleinman 1995 and 1997a; Watters). Whether it be in nineteenth-century China (with John Kerr’s “Refuge for the Insane” in Canton), postcolonial Uganda (Orley) or today’s Nepal (Acharya et al.), translating lexicons involves adapting representations of illnesses and disorders to cultures which rely on completely different concepts of what the human “psyche” is. Diagnostic concepts and therapeutic strategies have therefore been continually translated, negotiated, and reconfigured as they encountered different conceptions of personhood and suffering, revealing the historicity, instability, and co-production of seemingly universal psychiatric categories (Kleinman 1997b; Bemme and Kirmayer).
The study of circulations and transfers in the history of psychiatry may also lead to an examination of the reception of certain practices and concepts, including forms of resistance. As Fernand Braudel observed in 1959, “not all exchanges are self-evident; there are indeed cases in which borrowing was resisted” (Braudel, 1969, p. 293). Historians have fruitfully explored such dynamics in colonial contexts (Mahone and Vaughan; Coleborne; Ernst; Smith) and, more broadly, in international settings. Resistance to innovative practices imported from foreign countries could also be a real obstacle to their application, leading to a blunt rejection of a therapeutic model and creating tensions; the example of non-restraint and the strong opposition it met in France speaks volumes in this regard, as explained by Roy Porter: “despite Pinel’s striking off of the chains, absolute non-restraint was seen by Continental reformers as a quixotically English idée fixe, a foible of doctrinaire liberalism, and it was little imitated” (Porter, 2002, pp. 115-116). Rivalry between different nations could play a major role in the failure of circulations and transfers -but can also be considered as a paradoxical form or circulation – and competition could also be part of the process, as when Etienne Esquirol denounced England as a “jealous and rival nation”, the English being blamed for “taking credit for a discovery that was not theirs” (Esquirol, 1805, p. 7).
Circulations and transfers may also be studied at national, regional, and local levels (Ellis; Rollin and Reynolds). This conference therefore strongly encourages proposals that explore exchanges operating across different geographical scales and institutional settings. The circulation between asylums, prisons and workhouses as Poor Law Institutions in Britain in the 19th century is a valid illustration of the interconnection and circularity of social governance and the British system of poor relief and “any reasonably complete account of the way in which the insane were dealt with in the nineteenth century must take into account the important role played by the poor law and its local systems” (Miller, 2007, p. 36). Asylums, prisons and workhouses were part of the same system as “they were, after all, administered by the same persons”. (Bartlett) Transfers from the workhouse to the asylum were a constant feature and one of the official duties of the Commissioners in Lunacy was indeed to arrange for the transfer of all mentally ill people accommodated in workhouses to the county asylum whenever possible (Hodgkinson). Prisoners being transferred to lunatic asylums was also quite frequent, and their re-categorisation from “prisoners” to “patients” (thoroughly documented by Cox and Marland) demonstrates the fluid nature of such categories and the complementary roles of both institutions. This complementary nature is also evident in a more tangible way on a professional level, as many members of asylum staff moved from one institution to another, frequently leaving a post in prison to get a job in an asylum, or vice-versa (Wright).
The political dimension of psychiatric care should also be acknowledged, as therapeutic choices were rarely devoid of any ideological or political stance. Reformers often moved in complementary circles with porous boundaries. The combined influence of utilitarianism, utopian socialism, unitarianism, evangelicalism and even Chartism on the 19th-century lunacy reform movement and its implementation in lunatic asylums has been demonstrated in the British context (Dubois) and the anti-psychiatry movement that emerged in Britain and the US in the 1960s did not just question psychiatric care but challenged the social order as a whole (Szasz; Wall; Cooper).
Finally, the concept of circulation can also be used to analyse how psychiatric and scientific discourses moved beyond professional circles and were integrated into other non-professional media (literature, the press). Such approaches invite us to consider not only the circulation of expert knowledge but also its reception by the general public, via the construction of popular science for instance (Cooter). This may also encourage studies of visits to the institutions by families and friends, journalists, external visitors, etc., who, while not involved in the management of these institutions, nevertheless engaged with them and disseminated discourses based on their impressions and experiences (Mooney and Reinarz; Miron; Coleborne).
Submission guidelines
This international conference, to be held at Université Paris Nanterre on 4-6 March 2027, will thus welcome all historical approaches to psychiatry and more generally to the treatment of mental illness which reflect on the topic “Circulations & Transfers” from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century in English-speaking countries.
We invite proposals on “Circulations & Transfers” to be submitted by 20 September 2026.
Paper proposals (20-minute presentation format), written in English (approximately 250 words) and accompanied by a short biographical note in a single Word document, should be sent to whocaresconference@gmail.com
Please note this Call for Papers is for in-person presentations only.
The presentations will be exclusively in English.
Topics may include (but are not limited to): “Getting out of the Asylum” : physical transfer and circulations of patients between institutions and other places of care and/or going back home Transfers of patients and/or staff initiated in times of crisis or emergency e. g. wartime conditions Circulation of professionals/staff from one institution to another / other places of care or confinement Circulation of external visitors in and out of institutions (18th-19th-century asylum tourism, journalistic practices, visits from friends and relatives, etc.) Circulation of ideas and theories on the treatment of mental illness and diagnostic categories Circulation of clinical practices and therapeutic techniques The role of translation and language in psychiatry at an international level Material histories of psychiatry (circulating objects, drugs, devices, archives) Resistance, failure, distortion in the reception and adaptation of ideas/practices The construction of local/regional/national/international networks (e.g. international organisations, congresses etc.) The politics of dissemination of psychiatric knowledge (media, publishing)
Colonial and postcolonial circulations of psychiatric knowledge and institutions
Influence of political opinions on psychiatric practices: no-restraint, therapeutic communities, anti-psychiatry, care in the community …
Conference organisers
Cécile Birks (Université Paris Nanterre)
Claire Deligny (Université Paris Nanterre)
Laurence Dubois (Observatoire de l’aire britannique),
Elisabeth Fauquert (Politiques américaines/ORUS), CREA Nanterre
Laetitia Sansonetti (Prismes, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Scientific committee
Cécile Birks (Université Paris Nanterre)
Claire Deligny (Université Paris Nanterre)
Laurence Dubois (Université Paris Nanterre)
Elodie Edwards-Grossi (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL & Institut Universitaire de France)
Elisabeth Fauquert (Université Paris Nanterre)
Anatole Le Bras (Université Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)
Julie Le Gac (Université Paris Nanterre & Institut Universitaire de France)
Fabienne Moine (Université Paris-Est Créteil)
Michel Prum (Université Paris Cité)
Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Selected bibliography
https://whocares.hypotheses.org/selected-bibliography-circulations-transfers-2027
