The 8th European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), is Europe’s largest and most international conference with an African focus. It will take place in the University of Edinburgh’s central campus on June 11-14 2019, and is organised on behalf of the Research Network of African Studies Centres in Europe AEGIS. The conference brings together 1,500 leading researchers, policymakers, and leaders from across the world. There will also be a complementary series of artistic and cultural events, as well as networking and capacity building events, including some aimed at the next generation of African researchers. The Health stream of the upcoming ECAS Meetings have at least four panels related to madness and psychiatry. More information about these panels you can find below.

The call for papers closes on 21 January 2019. Read the conference theme, the information provided on the Call for papers page, or view the list of accepted panels. Papers must be proposed to a specific panel – there is no general ‘catch-all’ space. A special issue collecting papers from authors presenting across the panels is likely to follow.

If you have any questions about the event or the CfP you can contact Nancy Hunt: nrhunt@ufl.edu

Panels related to psychiatry

Madness beyond psychiatry: a comparative and interdisciplany study of mental disorder in Africa 

Short Abstract:

If madness is still a fertile ground for numerous researches in Europe, this issue remains to be explored in Africa. This multidisciplinary panel aims to reconsider madness beyond psychiatry in order to create a relevant laboratory to reassess both societies and State in Africa.

 Insanity and the Moral and Political Economies of Colonial Africa

Short Abstract:

This panel addresses the connections and disruptions in the relationship between mental illness, medicine, and patients’ illness narratives and experiences in Colonial Africa. In particular, we aim to reveal the contestation around these relationships with the wider political and moral economies.

Madness in Africa: In Official, Everyday, & Vernacular Lives

Short Abstract:

How best should we locate, interpret, and broaden the study of madness in Africa’s pasts and presents? The panel approaches madness as a capacious, shifting categories, and asks how the psychiatric meets or has combined with vernacular, expert, religious, diagnostic, and poetic modes of madness?

Disrupted Minds: Precarity, Politics and Psychiatry in Africa

Short Abstract:

This panel seeks to theorize the relationship between precarity, politics and psychiatry in Africa, attending to both historical and contemporary iterations. How do precarity and politics come together in African practices of psychiatry to explain/produce political and medical subjectivities