Working borders: mad studies, psychiatric museums, and decolonization

This essay considers recent, contemporary ’mad studies,’ in their activist, academic and museological dimensions, especially in the 2000s. It attends to mad histories in relation to Global North/Global South borders and other decolonizing aspects, and the emergence since the 1980s of mad/asylum museums in European and African manifestations. The notion of ’working borders’ is engaged in relation to disciplinary academic borders but also as working in scholarly or public elements and strands. It especially contextualizes such working of borders in activist historical work, thus beyond psychiatric historiography and since the 1960s.