Remeasuring Self and Society after Empire: The Human Sciences in Decolonization

Commentators / moderators: Rémy Amouroux (Université de Lausanne), Ana Antić (University of Copenhagen) (respective panels tbd)

Wed, 22 May 2024

09.15-9.30h: Welcome and Introduction

Panel I: Conjecturing Spaces (Room C1, Petal 5)

09.30–11.00h:
Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Florida): Psy Talk and the Social Sciences in Two Congolese Spaces, 1940s-1970s.

Carolyn Biltoft (Geneva Graduate Institute): Systemic Deconstructions and Reconstructions: Psychiatry, Postmodernism, and Global Holism after Decolonization.

11.00–11.15h Coffee Break

11.15–12.45h
Allison Sanders (Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris): Grey Areas: Researchers between France and Africa at Decolonization.
Nana Osei Quarshie (Yale University: Political Lunacy and the Making of Independent Ghana.

12.45-14.15h Lunch

Panel II: Redefining Social Categories (Room C1, Petal 5)

14.15–15.45h
Zine Magubane (Boston College): W.E.B DuBois and Pan-Africanism: The Impact of Decolonization on His Sociological Imagination.
Erik Linstrum (University of Virginia): Follow the Leader, Not the Elite: Authority and the Human Sciences in the Age of Decolonization.

15.45–16.15h Coffee Break

16.15-17.45h

Ishita Pande (Queen’s University, Kingston): De/Colonizing Sexology: Childhood, the Sciences of Homosexuality, and the Imagination of Hindu India.
Anne Schult (Washington University in St Louis): European Refugees at the End of Empire.

18.15-19.30h KEYNOTE LECTURE: Helen Tilley (Northwestern University): Thinking with Blind Men and Elephants: A Dialogue on Personhood, Empires, and Unknowable Things. (Lecture hall A2, Petal 1, Masion de la Paix)

19:45h Conference Dinner

Thurs, 23 May 2024

Panel III: Sciences as Shifting Fields (Room C1, Petal 5)

9.30–11.00h
Damiano Matasci (Université de Genève): A Shared Knowledge? Human Sciences and Inter-imperial Cooperation in Late Colonial Africa.
Ian Merkel (University of Groningen): The Human Sciences at the Semi periphery: National Autonomy, North Atlantic Collaborations, and Budding Global South Visions in Postwar Latin America.

11.00-11.15h Coffee Break

11.15-12.45h
Joshua Klein (Geneva Graduate Institute): From the Field to the Self: French Anthropology, Social Psychiatry and the Ambiguous Study of Acculturation in the Age of Decolonization, 1950–1980.
Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania): From “Cultural Change” to “Deculturation”: Making and Molding Cold War Violence in Paraguay during the 1970s.

12.45–14.15 Lunch

Panel IV: Registering Subjectivity (Room C1, Petal 5)

14.15-15.45h
Pokuaa Oduro-Bonsrah (Geneva Graduate Institute): Peering into Intimate Spaces: Psy Scientists and their Observations of Child Rearing Practices in Uganda (1940-1970s).
Leighan Renaud (University of Bristol): Re-Mapping Family Trees in Contemporary Caribbean Literature.

15.45-16.15 Coffee Break

16.15–17.45h
Richard Phillips (University of Sheffield): Adventure After Empire: Decolonizing Popular Geographies.
Rosa Eidelpes (Universität Wien): Ethnoboom, the Project of an “Alternative Ethnology” and Self-Alienation, or: Decolonizing the European Subject?

19.30h (tbc) Dinner

Fri, 24 May 2024

Panel V: Universality, Particularity (Room C1, Petal 5)

09.30-11.00h
Omnia El Shakry (Yale University): Freud in Translation: Three Essays, a Survey, and a Group.
Sloan Mahone (University of Oxford): From Abeokuta to the World: African Psychiatry and the Struggle for Universality in the Period of Decolonization.

11.00-11.15h Coffee Break

11.15-12.00h
Mischa Suter (Geneva Graduate Institute): The Place of Psychosis and the Effects of Racism in the Practice of Psychoanalysis (Paris, Dakar, 1960s).

12.00–12.30h
Concluding Discussion

12.30h: End of Conference – Snacks/Lunch