Madness decolonized?: Madness as transnational identity in Gail Hornstein’s Agnes’s Jacket

The US psychologist Gail Hornstein’s monograph Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009) is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an “anti-colonial” struggle to reclaim the experiential world “colonized” by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals make recourse to the inner world and (corresponding) cultural world of the mad, as well as to the ethno-symbolic cultural materials of dormant nationhood. This rhetoric is augmented by a model in which the mad comprise a diaspora without an origin, coalescing into a single transnational community. The mad are also depicted as persons displaced from their metaphorical homeland, the “inner” world “colonized” by the psychiatric regime. There are a number of difficulties with Hornstein’s rhetoric, however. Her “ethnicity-and-rights” response to the oppression of the mad is symptomatic of Western parochialism, while her proposed transmutation of putative psychopathology from limit upon identity to parameter of successful identity is open to contestation. Moreover, unless one accepts Hornstein’s porous vision of mad identity, her self-ascribed insider status in relation to the mad community may present a problematic “re-colonization” of mad experience

An anarchy of cultures: aesthetics and the changing school

It is the contention of this paper that schools are currently sandwiched between demands of the economy on one side and increasingly fundamentalist communities on the other; that schools need some degree of autonomy from each; that the greatest challenge of the century is how we can live together despite our differences; and that the only way of successfully meeting this challenge is for schools to put social justice at the heart of their activities, activities that are best informed by the cultivation of reasoned imagination – that is, by an aesthetic approach to the development of intellectual, social, cultural, economic and personal identities

Chercheurs à la barre

Les chercheurs en sciences sociales sont de plus en plus souvent confrontés à l'épreuve de la justice, soit du côté de l'accusation, soit du côté de la défense. Ils peuvent s'y retrouver accusés pour incompétence, diffamation ou entrave à la justice pour ne pas vouloir révéler leurs sources. Ils peuvent aussi y intervenir en tant que témoins experts pour aider les juges à prendre une décision. Dans un cas comme dans l'autre, de nombreuses questions surgissent sur le statut du chercheur. La tendance croissante à les traduire en justice ne démontre-t-elle pas un manque de protection de la profession ? Par ailleurs, la participation à la justice au titre de témoin expert ne fait-elle pas entrer en contradiction le "vrai" du chercheur et le "vrai" du juge 

Mobile French citizens and 'la mère-patrie' : emigration and diaspora policies in France

Emigration and mobility from France has been on the rise in twenty-first century. About 42% of the French abroad have two passports. Hence, the development of any policy towards such a diverse and hard-to-define group is tricky. France is one of a small number of developed countries that has actually taken up this challenge. Generally speaking, for French politicians, emigration is an element of a bigger puzzle of social cohesion, in a nation that cherishes an image of itself as a unified community of citizens, regardless of where they live. Substantively, it shows a concern about keeping in touch with those who have left. In this chapter we consider the policies that have shaped the French model response, both to diasporas and mobile citizens abroad

Diasporas à la française : recent francophone contributions to the literature

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