BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//132.216.98.100//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.20.4// BEGIN:VEVENT UID:20251110T124129EST-3661heTzpo@132.216.98.100 DTSTAMP:20251110T174129Z DESCRIPTION:Urban mental health beyond social relationships? Encountering a s a heuristic for co-laborative interdisciplinary engagements between anth ropology and psychiatry\n\nBy Patrick Bieler\, PhD\, Postdoctoral fellow\, Institute of European Ethnology\, Humbold-Universität zu Berlin\n\nRegist ration\n\nABSTRACT:\n\nAgainst the backdrop of increasing worldwide urbani zation\, the need for interdisciplinary joint work between psychiatry and the social sciences has become ever more apparent. Psychiatric research ha s established a causal relationship between urban life and mental illnesse s (especially schizophrenia) (Lederbogen et al. 2011\; Vassos et al. 20112 ). This has motivated anthropologists\, sociologists and human geographers to simultaneously draw on and move beyond Foucauldian inspired deconstruc tive critique of psychiatric institutions and knowledge production to esta blish modes of collaboration in which social scientists connect meaningful ly to psychiatric questions while participating equally with their core co mpetences (Bieler/Niewöhner 2018\; Fitzgerald et al. 2016\; Rose 2019\; Sö derström et al. 2016). In this presentation\, I will substantiate these me thodological developments with anthropological concept work to establish t he conditions for a productive engagement between the disciplines.\n\nPsyc hiatry is increasingly interested in how urban environments ‘get under the skin’ (Galea/Link 2011\; Winz 2018)\, thereby going beyond a strict biome dical focus on individual biology and lifestyle. Yet\, contrasted with the oretical reflections in anthropology\, the variable-based approach is char acterized by a distinction between humans and environmental ‘factors’\, an d a focus on ‘the social’ (Manning 2019)\, understood as broad social proc esses that shape and are mediated by mostly meaningful\, tight-knit social relations between humans. Neither simply discarding nor reifying these fi ndings\, I take them as starting points to unpack questions that have been so far unanswered: How is ‘the urban’ constituted in practice\, how impor tant are seemingly ‘absent’ social contacts\, how do humans embody emergen t environments in everyday life\, and which more-than human aspects are ce ntral to these processes?\n\nDrawing on ethnographic fieldwork with mental health care clients and providers in Berlin\, Germany\, I have introduced and refined the notion of the encounter as an analytic that sensitizes th e research focus to everyday activities\, fleeting relations\, ephemeral m oments and intangible atmospheric conditions in and of urban life (Bieler 2021). This concept work does not simply aim at filling psychiatric blind spots with ethnographic means\, however\, but pose more fundamental questi ons regarding the ontology of mental health and the city as well as the re lations between nature and culture\, the ’biological’ and ‘the social’\, h uman and environment. These imply consequences not only for psychiatric re search\, but also demand shifts within ethnographic practice and anthropol ogical reasoning.\n\nCurrently\, I am translating these sensitivities into a more systematically structured\, coherent research design in the co-lab orative research project “Mind the City!”. In the remainder of the present ation\, I will present the basic ideas of the design\, discuss preliminary research findings from a first round of interviews and reflect on the pos sible routes future research in the domain of urban mental health might ta ke as well as what challenges need to be further addressed.\n\nBIO:\n\nPat rick Bieler is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of European Ethnolog y at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin\, where he has recently defended his P hD thesis. Currently\, he is conducting research in one Berlin neighborhoo d as part of the co-laborative research project “Mind the City!” (funded b y the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG\, German Research Foundation) – 427092996). His main interests are Social Anthropology of Science and Tec hnology\, Medical Anthropology\, Urban Anthropology and Human-Environment Relations.\n DTSTART:20220317T190000Z DTEND:20220317T210000Z SUMMARY:Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry & the Politics of P sychic Life Speaker Series URL:/psychiatry/channels/event/division-social-and-tra nscultural-psychiatry-politics-psychic-life-speaker-series-338280 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR