Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Theses
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ItemInterrupting knowledge, decolonising care: understanding mental health with a refugee-run NGO in Sydney, Australia( 2017)Any expression of medical pluralism will reflect the organisation and hierarchisation of its traditions of knowledge. My thesis attends to moments in which diverse understandings of mental affliction are negotiated, and sometimes even silenced, in the networks and relationships surrounding a Sydney NGO. Here, alongside this NGO run for and by people from Central Africa, I explore approaches to questions of what mental affliction is, various notions of who (mis)understands it, and how afflictions and their percieved misunderstanding are dealt with. In the process, the category of ‘mental health’ emerges and disappears, is challenged and negotiated, within jostling epistemological frames of understanding. To examine this therapeutic landscape, I prioritise modes of analysis that are sensitive to the fluctuating complexities of caring for community through existing, yet not always equitable, structures for such care. I draw on affect theory’s slowness and attunement to the unseen, often unarticulated forces that unfold in encounters, conversations and in what is articulated (Stewart 2017: 192). Affective scenes provide an access point to each chapter's textured study of the refugee-migrant community health assemblage, which is examined in terms of: historical context (Chapter One), NGO sector development (Chapter Two), education (Chapter Three), belief (Chapter Four), faith (Chapter Five), and care (Chapter Six). Through such attention, this thesis asks after what medical pluralism looks like when a group of people with histories of a range of healing traditions—psychiatry, cosmopolitan medicine, religious faith healing, and spiritual cleansing of curses—move to Australia? How were these different knowledge traditions treated and talked about? And how could one meaningfully study these pluralities?—what would anthropological research and ethnographic writing, as modes of knowledge creation, come up against in trying to engage with plural traditions of knowledge? Through representational sensibilities, moments of ethnographic attention and narratives that circle back and interrupt themselves, this thesis builds an argument for ambivalence towards conclusive uses of knowledge. Ambivalence is presented as a counter to the kinds of simplified understandings of diversity that are often salient in the migrant health and community development sector, and that are shown, through this ethnography to beget subtle, structurally violent effects. I frame such ambivalence as an act of care. Part examination of the tensions “between fragmentation and connectedness-in-the-making” (Biehl and McKay 2012: 1210), part portrait of the tensions held in suspense when crafting an ethnography of knowledge(s), my work seeks to contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge and care.
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ItemNeuroscience’s brain: a study of material, practice and imagination in neuroscience’s expanding scope( 2017)This thesis is a brain-based study of neuroscience. While human beings have studied the brain and considered its role in what makes a human being since at least the ancient Greeks, neuroscience is a very specific contemporary formation. Within the project laid out by the field to understand the human mind in terms of the brain, what is considered to be within the scope of research on the brain includes a growing range of complex human phenomena. This ethnographic study explores the growth of neuroscience and considers the factors that sustain its entry into the investigation of an ever-broadening research scope. The thesis is an ‘object ethnography’ that explores neuroscience as a particular cultural world through a focus on the brain as neuroscience’s object. The research involved participant observation in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience laboratories and interviews with neuroscientist key informants in a major metropolitan Australian city, as well as an analysis of popular neuroscience books written by key neuroscientist writers. My central argument is that ‘neuroscience’s brain’ provides an evolving multidisciplinary field with coherence and with the ability to expand into the study of increasingly complex human issues. Through my ethnographic data I show: first, how neuroscience’s brain addresses organisational needs by bringing together a diverse group of scientists and providing them with space within the field where they are able to develop their particular areas of interest; second, how the brain, conceived of as both mind and body, embodies tensions between the material and immaterial that are used productively to drive neuroscientific work forward; third, how the brain facilitates the mixing of neuroscientific knowledge with other domains of knowledge through its status as a particularly human kind of scientific object. Neuroscience’s brain provides concrete explanations of human behaviour, allows materiality to be extended into areas where the material is not yet able to go, and through mixing with other systems of meaning, is seen to provide a compelling frame within which human life can be imagined. By focusing on the brain and drawing on theories of objects from medical anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emphasise the material, processual and imaginative, I show how an approach to understanding the human is taking shape in the work of neuroscience, and in neuroscientists’ broader articulations of their object beyond the laboratory. The thesis provides an alternative account of the links between brain, human, and neuroscience; links that, within a neuroscience explosion, are taken to be natural and self-evident.