Paola Juan
University of Lausanne, ISSR - Institut de Sciences Sociales des Religions, FTSR, Teaching Assistant
(English below)
Paola Juan est anthropologue et assistante diplômée à l'UNIL. Son doctorat est co-dirigé par la Professeure Irene Becci (ISSR, UNIL) et Dr. Aude Fauvel (MER, IHM, CHUV-UNIL). Il a été suivi par la Professeure Tanya Luhrmann lors de son séjour Mobi.Doc à Stanford, US.
Son projet de doctorat s'intitule « On Freedom and Madness. Affects, psychiatry and territories in the Swiss Alps ». La recherche porte sur les formes de liberté, de soins et d'affects à l'interface entre les services psychiatriques, les communautés et les associations dans la Suisse rurale. Elle s’intéresse aux formes de liberté émergeant dans des espaces où la contrainte est par ailleurs très présente. Elle se questionne sur les relations entre liberté et contrainte dans ces lieux de soins, et sur la manière dont ces relations participent à la conception de points de vue divergents sur ce qui constitue du “bon soin” (good care) pour les personnes diagnostiquées avec des troubles mentaux. La thèse explore les différentes facettes du terme de liberté qui sont visibles au niveau ethnographique et qui ainsi deviennent une sorte de typologie. Elle montre comment ces perspectives sur la liberté dépendent des structures sociales et affectives dans lesquelles les individus sont imbriqués. Cette recherche examine ces questions en relation avec une tradition et philosophie de soins particulière développée dans l’institution psychiatrique publique d’une région profondément catholique. Ces services de santé sont basés sur des formes de soins « humanistes » et sur des principes non biomédicaux pour les personnes qui sont hospitalisées en psychiatrie de manière répétée.
Paola Juan a étudié aux universités de Neuchâtel et de Lausanne (BA) et à la London School of Economics (MSc), où elle a reçu le prix Maurice Freedman (2018) pour le meilleur travail de master en anthropologie sociale. Elle a été chargée de cours à l'Université de Lausanne en 2021 et 2022. Elle a également obtenu une bourse de mobilité en 2023 pour un séjour de recherche avec Tanya Luhrmann au département d'anthropologie de l'Université de Stanford.
Domaines de recherche :
Anthropologie médicale, anthropologie des sciences ‘psy’
Anthropologie des institutions de santé
Méthodes ethnographiques exploratoires et anthropologie graphique
Suisse, Europe occidentale
___
Paola Juan is an anthropologist and graduate assistant at UNIL. Her PhD is co-supervised by Prof. Irene Becci (ISSR, UNIL) and Dr. Aude Fauvel (MER, IHM, CHUV-UNIL), and was supervised by Prof. Tanya Luhrmann during her Mobi.Doc stay at Stanford, US.
Her PhD project is titled “On Freedom and Madness: Affects, psychiatry and territories in the Swiss Alps”. The research examines forms of freedom, care and affect at the interface between psychiatric services, communities and non-profit associations in a rural region of Switzerland. It looks at how forms of freedom emerge in spaces where constraint often is central. It asks how freedom and constraint are entangled in these caring relationships, and how they participate in shaping divergent ideological views regarding what constitutes good care for people diagnosed with mental disorders. The thesis investigates different facets of the term freedom which become evident on the ethnographic level, and coalesce into a typology. It shows how these views depend on the social and affective structures in which one is enmeshed, and how they consequently lead to different viewpoints regarding what good care consists of. This research delves into these questions in relation to the specific philosophy of care developed within this particular psychiatric institution, located in a deeply Catholic region. These services are based on ‘humanistic’ forms of care and non-biomedical principles for people who are recurrently hospitalised into psychiatry. Heterogeneous visions of care and freedom are explored in relation to local catholic, anarchist and counter-hegemonic cultures, as well as legal, medical and users’/patients’ perspectives.
Paola Juan studied at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne (BA) and at the London School of Economics (MSc), where she received the Maurice Freedman prize (2018) for the best PhD dissertation in Social Anthropology. She was a part-time lecturer at the University of Lausanne in 2021 and 2022. She was also awarded a mobility grant in 2023for a research stay with Tanya Luhrmann atthe Department of Anthropology of Stanford University.
Research interests :
Medical anthropology, anthropology of the ‘psy’ sciences
Anthropology of health institutions
Exploratory ethnographic methods and graphic anthropology
Switzerland, Western Europe
Paola Juan est anthropologue et assistante diplômée à l'UNIL. Son doctorat est co-dirigé par la Professeure Irene Becci (ISSR, UNIL) et Dr. Aude Fauvel (MER, IHM, CHUV-UNIL). Il a été suivi par la Professeure Tanya Luhrmann lors de son séjour Mobi.Doc à Stanford, US.
Son projet de doctorat s'intitule « On Freedom and Madness. Affects, psychiatry and territories in the Swiss Alps ». La recherche porte sur les formes de liberté, de soins et d'affects à l'interface entre les services psychiatriques, les communautés et les associations dans la Suisse rurale. Elle s’intéresse aux formes de liberté émergeant dans des espaces où la contrainte est par ailleurs très présente. Elle se questionne sur les relations entre liberté et contrainte dans ces lieux de soins, et sur la manière dont ces relations participent à la conception de points de vue divergents sur ce qui constitue du “bon soin” (good care) pour les personnes diagnostiquées avec des troubles mentaux. La thèse explore les différentes facettes du terme de liberté qui sont visibles au niveau ethnographique et qui ainsi deviennent une sorte de typologie. Elle montre comment ces perspectives sur la liberté dépendent des structures sociales et affectives dans lesquelles les individus sont imbriqués. Cette recherche examine ces questions en relation avec une tradition et philosophie de soins particulière développée dans l’institution psychiatrique publique d’une région profondément catholique. Ces services de santé sont basés sur des formes de soins « humanistes » et sur des principes non biomédicaux pour les personnes qui sont hospitalisées en psychiatrie de manière répétée.
Paola Juan a étudié aux universités de Neuchâtel et de Lausanne (BA) et à la London School of Economics (MSc), où elle a reçu le prix Maurice Freedman (2018) pour le meilleur travail de master en anthropologie sociale. Elle a été chargée de cours à l'Université de Lausanne en 2021 et 2022. Elle a également obtenu une bourse de mobilité en 2023 pour un séjour de recherche avec Tanya Luhrmann au département d'anthropologie de l'Université de Stanford.
Domaines de recherche :
Anthropologie médicale, anthropologie des sciences ‘psy’
Anthropologie des institutions de santé
Méthodes ethnographiques exploratoires et anthropologie graphique
Suisse, Europe occidentale
___
Paola Juan is an anthropologist and graduate assistant at UNIL. Her PhD is co-supervised by Prof. Irene Becci (ISSR, UNIL) and Dr. Aude Fauvel (MER, IHM, CHUV-UNIL), and was supervised by Prof. Tanya Luhrmann during her Mobi.Doc stay at Stanford, US.
Her PhD project is titled “On Freedom and Madness: Affects, psychiatry and territories in the Swiss Alps”. The research examines forms of freedom, care and affect at the interface between psychiatric services, communities and non-profit associations in a rural region of Switzerland. It looks at how forms of freedom emerge in spaces where constraint often is central. It asks how freedom and constraint are entangled in these caring relationships, and how they participate in shaping divergent ideological views regarding what constitutes good care for people diagnosed with mental disorders. The thesis investigates different facets of the term freedom which become evident on the ethnographic level, and coalesce into a typology. It shows how these views depend on the social and affective structures in which one is enmeshed, and how they consequently lead to different viewpoints regarding what good care consists of. This research delves into these questions in relation to the specific philosophy of care developed within this particular psychiatric institution, located in a deeply Catholic region. These services are based on ‘humanistic’ forms of care and non-biomedical principles for people who are recurrently hospitalised into psychiatry. Heterogeneous visions of care and freedom are explored in relation to local catholic, anarchist and counter-hegemonic cultures, as well as legal, medical and users’/patients’ perspectives.
Paola Juan studied at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne (BA) and at the London School of Economics (MSc), where she received the Maurice Freedman prize (2018) for the best PhD dissertation in Social Anthropology. She was a part-time lecturer at the University of Lausanne in 2021 and 2022. She was also awarded a mobility grant in 2023for a research stay with Tanya Luhrmann atthe Department of Anthropology of Stanford University.
Research interests :
Medical anthropology, anthropology of the ‘psy’ sciences
Anthropology of health institutions
Exploratory ethnographic methods and graphic anthropology
Switzerland, Western Europe
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Drafts by Paola Juan
Manifeste original (EN) en open access, de Bear, Ho, Tsing, Yanagisako: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism
Papers by Paola Juan
Traduction de Paola Juan
https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25519
It thus explores the valuation process of Parity of Esteem through the Valuation Studies perspective, discussing, in particular, the use of standardized and technocratic language and the politics of knowledge in such operations, while inquiring into the subsequent limitations for Valuation Studies. It then draws attention to several critical aspects of the study of valuation and the way it has been approached by scholars of Valuation Studies.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/asdi_1662-4653_2020_num_15_1_1187
Comment l’incertitude influence-t-elle les subjectivités de patients alors qu’ils ou elles sont au plus fort de leur vulnérabilité psychique et souffrance mentale ?
Dans la revue Terrain: anthropologie & sciences humaines
Conference Presentations by Paola Juan
Rethinking “engaged anthropology” from our embodied experience of fieldwork, this panel draws on feminist and decolonial research contesting the heroic self-image of the anthropologist who “engage[s] in lone acts of bravery in order to shed light on the struggles of others with less relative privilege” (Berry et al. 2017). Despite criticisms and calls for reflexivity, this image has persisted widely in academia, reproducing, as “collateral damage”, gendered, racialized and colonial forms of violence manifested in research and teaching at our universities. The image of the brave, strong and independent researcher ignores the fact that power relations within the societies and groups we study can work on our bodies and minds in similar constraining and oppressive ways. Thereby, it also implies that a researcher’s vulnerability represents a personal failure or individual problem rather than the structural condition of their positions, both during fieldwork and within academic institutions. As anthropologists, however, we are not always in a privileged position to stand up against the violence and oppression we experience in the field. In certain situations, we are scared, vulnerable and condemned to silence in much the same way as our research partners.
Confronting the heroic self-image of the anthropologist, this panel seeks to investigate the methodological, ethical and epistemological consequences of “reciprocal vulnerabilities” for the discipline. We invite contributions that explore risk, vulnerability, violence, guilt and privilege in fieldwork, as well as how these experiences, emotions and positionalities are shaped by institutional structures of academia. Moreover, we encourage participants to examine and reflect on the links between practices of solidarity, self-care and caring for others and how they may reshape the ways we produce ethnographic knowledge and practice anthropology.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1URQB1eBsfSCUQDK0X8QpdYx6XbU1M0xHY6iOZGCh8Oc/viewform?edit_requested=true
This poster explores gift exchange and valuation based on a fieldwork experience during which I gave strangers portraits drawings of themselves in Xlendi Bay, Malta. During a few weeks, I proposed portraits on the street with a poster sign on which you could read « portrait for free ». Portraits were monetary free; it was established that in exchange, I was getting data. However, participants systematically decided to give me back much more than what was expected of them initially. Why? What does this case study tell us about the valuation and performativity of these portrait gifts? As the poster shows, the construction of monetary value took place through (1) creation of intimacy, made possible through the unbounded offer of my time, corporeal positioning, and my own gaze, but also through the act of giving itself and its moral implications; (2) the cultural potential of identification and recognition in the portrait; (3) the visibility of the act of production and the importance of subjective valuation; and finally (4) the blurred boundaries between commodity and gift, when a craft is given in a social setting which is usually associated with monetary exchange.
Convenor: Yuxin Peng (University of Oxford)
Discussant: Professor Elisabeth Hsu (University of Oxford)
The reflections developed in this presentation are part of an ongoing research project. I start by drawing on my fieldwork experience last year in a Swiss psychiatric hospital to show how a particular place can be both hopeful and troubling; how the paradigmatic shifts in psychiatry have contributed to complexify the landscape today, since psychiatric care inherits from these different periods and views, especially through the materiality and spatiality of built structures. I then explore how this complexification results not only in controversy and debate within the field, but also in the development of two axes of othering processes: one that is temporary, that is, hopeful, and one that is permanent. I formulate the hypothesis that this duality might be what defines the current generative timescapes of psychiatric care.
It explores the processes of their massive waste production and shows how sorting collectibles implies to dichotomize and classify what is valuable (memorable), from what is not (forgettable). This value hierarchization, at the core of the film archive’s activities, is the result of a “logic of rescuing” which is central to patrimonial institutions' aspirations. Such a logic also results from the shared resources and sociopolitical relationships between the Swiss film archive and other archives. This fact highlights the importance of conceptualizing this institution within a “network of aspirations”. Approached in a diachronic way, such network constitutes the condition of institutional dynamism and social change, which complexifies Kopytoff’s (1986) static view of museal institutions as structural « segments of society » tied together by a mechanical solidarity and common cultural values.
It identifies three attitudes towards uncertainty at play in the psychiatric hospital X: (1) calculation, (2) embracement, (3) denial. The first is hegemonic today, the second appears in informal timescapes, and the third is tied to the history of the asylum: although repeatedly dismissed, it is inscribed in the core of psychiatric practices. It shows how a systemic, calculative attitude of uncertainty contributes to devaluing patients’ subjectivities and sense of trust in their own capacity to shape their own path and to understand their own intimate lives. This can leave them on an even more uncertain path with a language which serves to provide an external and reductive understanding of their own subjectivity, without the possibility of socialized and integrated change in relation to their own agency.
Manifeste original (EN) en open access, de Bear, Ho, Tsing, Yanagisako: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism
Traduction de Paola Juan
https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25519
It thus explores the valuation process of Parity of Esteem through the Valuation Studies perspective, discussing, in particular, the use of standardized and technocratic language and the politics of knowledge in such operations, while inquiring into the subsequent limitations for Valuation Studies. It then draws attention to several critical aspects of the study of valuation and the way it has been approached by scholars of Valuation Studies.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/asdi_1662-4653_2020_num_15_1_1187
Comment l’incertitude influence-t-elle les subjectivités de patients alors qu’ils ou elles sont au plus fort de leur vulnérabilité psychique et souffrance mentale ?
Dans la revue Terrain: anthropologie & sciences humaines
Rethinking “engaged anthropology” from our embodied experience of fieldwork, this panel draws on feminist and decolonial research contesting the heroic self-image of the anthropologist who “engage[s] in lone acts of bravery in order to shed light on the struggles of others with less relative privilege” (Berry et al. 2017). Despite criticisms and calls for reflexivity, this image has persisted widely in academia, reproducing, as “collateral damage”, gendered, racialized and colonial forms of violence manifested in research and teaching at our universities. The image of the brave, strong and independent researcher ignores the fact that power relations within the societies and groups we study can work on our bodies and minds in similar constraining and oppressive ways. Thereby, it also implies that a researcher’s vulnerability represents a personal failure or individual problem rather than the structural condition of their positions, both during fieldwork and within academic institutions. As anthropologists, however, we are not always in a privileged position to stand up against the violence and oppression we experience in the field. In certain situations, we are scared, vulnerable and condemned to silence in much the same way as our research partners.
Confronting the heroic self-image of the anthropologist, this panel seeks to investigate the methodological, ethical and epistemological consequences of “reciprocal vulnerabilities” for the discipline. We invite contributions that explore risk, vulnerability, violence, guilt and privilege in fieldwork, as well as how these experiences, emotions and positionalities are shaped by institutional structures of academia. Moreover, we encourage participants to examine and reflect on the links between practices of solidarity, self-care and caring for others and how they may reshape the ways we produce ethnographic knowledge and practice anthropology.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1URQB1eBsfSCUQDK0X8QpdYx6XbU1M0xHY6iOZGCh8Oc/viewform?edit_requested=true
This poster explores gift exchange and valuation based on a fieldwork experience during which I gave strangers portraits drawings of themselves in Xlendi Bay, Malta. During a few weeks, I proposed portraits on the street with a poster sign on which you could read « portrait for free ». Portraits were monetary free; it was established that in exchange, I was getting data. However, participants systematically decided to give me back much more than what was expected of them initially. Why? What does this case study tell us about the valuation and performativity of these portrait gifts? As the poster shows, the construction of monetary value took place through (1) creation of intimacy, made possible through the unbounded offer of my time, corporeal positioning, and my own gaze, but also through the act of giving itself and its moral implications; (2) the cultural potential of identification and recognition in the portrait; (3) the visibility of the act of production and the importance of subjective valuation; and finally (4) the blurred boundaries between commodity and gift, when a craft is given in a social setting which is usually associated with monetary exchange.
Convenor: Yuxin Peng (University of Oxford)
Discussant: Professor Elisabeth Hsu (University of Oxford)
The reflections developed in this presentation are part of an ongoing research project. I start by drawing on my fieldwork experience last year in a Swiss psychiatric hospital to show how a particular place can be both hopeful and troubling; how the paradigmatic shifts in psychiatry have contributed to complexify the landscape today, since psychiatric care inherits from these different periods and views, especially through the materiality and spatiality of built structures. I then explore how this complexification results not only in controversy and debate within the field, but also in the development of two axes of othering processes: one that is temporary, that is, hopeful, and one that is permanent. I formulate the hypothesis that this duality might be what defines the current generative timescapes of psychiatric care.
It explores the processes of their massive waste production and shows how sorting collectibles implies to dichotomize and classify what is valuable (memorable), from what is not (forgettable). This value hierarchization, at the core of the film archive’s activities, is the result of a “logic of rescuing” which is central to patrimonial institutions' aspirations. Such a logic also results from the shared resources and sociopolitical relationships between the Swiss film archive and other archives. This fact highlights the importance of conceptualizing this institution within a “network of aspirations”. Approached in a diachronic way, such network constitutes the condition of institutional dynamism and social change, which complexifies Kopytoff’s (1986) static view of museal institutions as structural « segments of society » tied together by a mechanical solidarity and common cultural values.
It identifies three attitudes towards uncertainty at play in the psychiatric hospital X: (1) calculation, (2) embracement, (3) denial. The first is hegemonic today, the second appears in informal timescapes, and the third is tied to the history of the asylum: although repeatedly dismissed, it is inscribed in the core of psychiatric practices. It shows how a systemic, calculative attitude of uncertainty contributes to devaluing patients’ subjectivities and sense of trust in their own capacity to shape their own path and to understand their own intimate lives. This can leave them on an even more uncertain path with a language which serves to provide an external and reductive understanding of their own subjectivity, without the possibility of socialized and integrated change in relation to their own agency.