Disability Studies and Mad Studies

Title: Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Disability in the American South
 
Abstract:
In the United States plantation system, psychiatric and medical discourses were central to the creation of beliefs about the alleged inferiority of the enslaved person in both body and mind. Physicians invented mental illnesses to pathologize normal reactions or resistance to the brutality of slavery. These ideas did not disappear at the end of the Civil War but continued to permeate the emerging profession of psychiatry into the twentieth century, creating an epidemic of trauma through the mistreatment of disability and mental illness. In this project I draw on extensive archival sources to show the ways that Southern psychiatric hospitals in the mid twentieth century had become home to many thousands of Black patients with mental and physical disabilities, where treatment and care was custodial at best, violent and abusive at worst. From the process of admission, to misdiagnosis and lack of care, psychiatric hospitals in the Jim Crow South were no place of asylum for Black patients. They functioned as symbolic and actual spaces of institutional terror, approached by Black communities with caution. Yet they were also the scene of important Civil Rights activism in the 1960s which revealed the ways that psychiatry functioned as a tool of white supremacy. This activism led to the end of segregation, but could not fix the racism that underpins the provision of mental health and disability care today.
 
Bio:
Kylie Smith is Associate Professor and the 2021-2022 President’s Humanities Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Kylie teaches the history of race and US health care in both the School of Nursing and the Department of History at Emory. Her previous book “Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing” was published by Rutgers University Press in 2020 and was awarded Book of the Year from both the American Journal of Nursing and the American Association for the History of Nursing. Her new book project called “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South” is supported by a grant from the National Library of Medicine. 

Jenifer L. Barclay, “Family Matters: The Social Relations of Disability in Enslaved Families and Communities.” 
 
The meeting will be a discussion of a chapter entitled “Reimagined Communities: Disability and the Making of Slave Families, Communities, and Culture” from Barclay's first book, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021). The chapter examines the overlooked and unacknowledged roles of enslaved people with disabilities in contributing to the social cohesion of their vulnerable families and communities. Historians of slavery have noted that factors like age and gender shaped the daily lives of enslaved people, but ignored the social relations of disability in these spaces. Because they were devalued by slaveholders, enslaved people with disabilities were less likely to be sold and more likely to contribute important family and community-based labor. Yet ableism also existed within slave communities that sometimes left them marginalized and excluded. 
 
Barclay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute and Case Western Reserve University. Barclay is an associate editor for Review of Disability Studies and her first book, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America, appears in the University of Illinois Press’s “Disability Histories” series. With Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy she is editing a collection, 'Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power', and is working on her second project, 'Between Two Worlds: Disability and Segregation in Southern Education from Emancipation to Integration'.

Kateřina Kolářová, "Rehabilitative Post-Socialism: Disability, Race, Gender, and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging" (forthcoming with University of Michigan Press).
 
The meeting will be a discussion of a chapter entitled “The Inadaptable (Non-)Citizen: The Racialised Logic of the Provisionally Permanent Abandonment."
 
Kolářová teaches at the Department of Sociology in the Gender Studies program, Charles University, Prague. Her work engages intersections of disability, crip, queer and race theories. Most recently, her manuscript Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Race, Gender and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging won the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in Humanities (forthcoming with Michigan University Press). Together with Martina Winkler she co-edited Re/Imaginations of Disability in State Socialism: Visions, Promises, Frustrations (forthcoming with Campus Verlag in 2021).
 
Please join us. All are welcome. We will provide CART. Please contact Mike Rembis if you have any questions or concerns, or you need further accommodation.

Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
 
Burch is a professor of American Studies at Middlebury College. Her research and teaching interests focus on deaf, disability, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and gender and sexuality in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. Material culture, oral history, and inclusive design play an important role in her courses.
 
Please join us. All are welcome. We will provide CART. Please contact Mike Rembis if you have any questions or concerns, or you need further accommodation.
 
Please use the following URL to access the open access book: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469663364_burch

Jaipreet Virdi, "Weaving History & Memoir: Writing Hearing Happiness."
 
Virdi is the author of, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).
 
Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology, and disability. Her research and teaching interests include the history of medicine, the history of science, disability history, disability technologies, and material/visual culture studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto (2014).
 
Please join us. All are welcome. We will provide CART. Please contact Mike Rembis if you have any questions or concerns, or you need further accommodation.
 

Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber, Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District (University of Illinois Press, 2020).
 
Bruce J. Dierenfield is a professor of history and director of the All-College Honors Program at Canisius College. His five previous books include the prizewinning The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America. David A. Gerber is a University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus and director emeritus of the University at Buffalo Center for Disability Studies. He is the author of Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century and editor of Disabled Veterans in History.
 
Please join us for our first meeting. All are welcome. We will provide CART. Please contact Mike Rembis if you have any questions or concerns, or you need further accommodation.