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A History of Psychiatry in Objects

by Bettina Alavi and Ralph Höger

Using the agency of objects as an approach in university-based teacher training seminar
During the winter semester of 2017/18, students on the teacher training course at Heidelberg University of Education and students at the University of Heidelberg took part in the seminar “A History of Psychiatry in Objects”. This seminar was designed and taught by the history educationalist Bettina Alavi and Ralph Höger, a doctoral candidate at the Heidelberg School of Education. The seminar adopted Disability History (Waldschmidt/Bösl 2017; Bösl 2010) as its approach, focusing in particular on the question of the “agency” of material culture (that is, the agency of things and objects). The seminar enquired to which extent objects both contribute to and constitute 20th- and 21st-century understandings of psychiatry: how are the boundaries drawn between healthy/unhealthy, normal/not normal, socially acceptable/inacceptable? Our underlying assumption was that social id…

How exclusive is disability history? How inclusive it may be?

By: Sebastian Barsch

Last week, to the occasion of the annual carnival festivities, the people of Cologne firmly took control over public space. As a result the Cologne city-scape became packed with colourful costumes, dancing people and a lot of laughter. In between all those manifestations of carnival one occasionally could encounter a man or woman dressed up like a person with disabilities.

One of those persons was my colleague Mona Massumi. She masqueraded herself as the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo suffered lifelong health problems and has often been a subject of disability theory.1 Mona decided upon this costume because for her Frida Kahlo symbolizes a “strong woman in history: despite her difficult personal circumstances (sufferings caused by her disability, infidelity of her husband and the lack of recognition as an artist) she didn't lose her passion and courage.” As Mona is quite into diversity studies, she is well acquainted with the discussions about the …

On Blindness in Poetry

By Reja-e Busailah

I am told that I lost my eyesight during the seventh month of my life. I was educated in boarding schools, in schools specially for the blind, and in public schools. I taught the blind when I was still living in Palestine, where I was born in 1929, when I lived in New York City, when I worked in Kuwait; and I hold a master’s degree in special education. Still, I should be embarrassed to admit that studying in a scholarly fashion the phenomenon of blindness (“disability”) has never seriously interested me. I have a Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University, and I taught literature for some thirty years. I am now a retired professor emeritus. I have enjoyed poetry all my life, writing it in Arabic when a child and later in English. I may say I have used poetry to react to all things that have interested me including, of course, the phenomenon of blindness, not academically, but as a poet. I have lived with blindness all my life, and have become accustomed t…

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