Steven Reinhart

ERIC REINHART, then a graduate student at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was awarded funding in October 2017 to aid research on “Practices of Care: Mental Health and Race in ‘The Great American City’” supervised by Dr. Jean Comaroff. An historical ethnography, this project traces the constitutive interrelation between modern psychiatric, racial, and aesthetic ideas from their shared origin in 18th-century German anthropology and philosophy to their consequences for everyday practices of care and overlapping psychiatric, prison, and policing systems in Chicago today. How do racialized individuals and communities subjected to long histories of pathologization, violence, and ongoing exclusion by Euro-American psychiatric traditions now negotiate the need for care in the face of these realities and the distrust they have earned? What forms of care and community operate at the margins of professional mental health services, and how might they challenge, resist, or subvert dominant ways of perceiving and relating to difference? What ethical-political implications might they hold for the nature of group formation and community-building, and what pragmatic policy potential could they offer for redesigning the United States’ failing health and safety systems? These are among the questions to which this project attempts to offer an ethnographically grounded, historically deep response.