past research

My previous research centered on the forms of care that emerge in the aftermath of generational displacement and dispossession in South Africa, querying how the embodied knowledge of community health workers disrupt Euro-American psychotherapeutic norms. Over twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2013-2018, my research traced the generational afterlives of apartheid through a community-based mental health organization located in Khayelitsha, the largest township in Cape Town.

My work followed the practices and struggles of black community mental health workers—who share a history of displacement, marginalization, and economic precarity with their clients—as they attempt to provide care for a variety of mental health issues in a larger context of structural racism, waning infrastructure, and the most extreme wealth gap in the world.

Through working in this context, I saw the community health workers practicing a form “generational care:” they actively drew on their embodied history of living through the end of apartheid and its aftermath to address the needs of their clients more fully. In doing so, community health workers were often caught between practicing a form of generational care—which emphasizes the structural and generational dimensions of mental health struggles—and the norms of Euro-American psychiatric practice, which conversely privilege individual pathology, remediation, and intervention.