Call For Participation for the panel: “Therapeutic Encounters”
115th AAA Annual Meeting “Evidence, Accident, Discovery”
Nov. 16-20, 2016, Minneapolis
Organisers: Aidan Seale-Feldman (UCLA) and Raphaëlle Rabanes (UC Berkeley)
Discussant: Lisa Stevenson (McGill University)
The topic of care has become an object of growing inquiry and debate in medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and the anthropology of humanitarianism (Cohen 2008; Stevenson 2014; Ticktin 2011). In this work, care has been problematized in important ways, questioning the landscape in which acts of compassion emerge, and examining their unintended outcomes. Care increasingly appears as double-faced: demonstrations of interest and desire to help are imbued with forms of violence and control, tied to histories of oppression and discrimination. Recent works have also attended to alternate imaginings of care, latent practices in which other modes of caring persist. This panel builds on these conversations, but shifts the focus from care to the domain of therapeutic encounters.
Here we are interested in the emergent, improvised, and creative dimensions of therapeutic encounters and the often unexpected ways in which healing may be achieved. Particularly in places disrupted by humanitarian disaster, histories of domination, and structural conditions of economic precarity, therapeutic efficacy may exist in forms outside or alongside those taught by official bodies. By focusing on these less predictable dimensions of therapeutic encounters, we draw on work in phenomenological and psychoanalytic anthropology which focuses on intersubjective interactions and the worlds called into existence by them, by both patients and therapists.
We invite papers that consider therapeutic encounters in the broadest sense, not only those confined to official medical or psychiatric settings. We ask panelists to consider forms of therapeutic improvisation and bricolage as they emerge within and are shaped by particular histories and contexts of power and inequality, such as postcolonialism and regimes of development and humanitarian aid. What are therapeutic acts? Who creates them? How do they exist within and outside of clinical settings? What comes into presence, and what is enacted in therapeutic encounters? Where can therapeutic efficacy be located and what are its myriad forms? What form does healing take under conditions of material or institutional lack?
Please send abstracts of 250 words, along with paper title and keywords, to Aidan Seale-Feldman (xxxxxx@ucla.edu) and Raphaëlle Rabanes (xxxxxx@berkeley.edu) by March 21, 2016, for notification by March 30.