As a socio-cultural anthropologist by training, I have carried out historical and ethnographic research related to colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary psychiatric practices and assemblages in Senegal. Specifically, I have written about the emergence, disavowal, and afterlife of a distinctive project in transcultural psychiatry that was initiated at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic during the 1960s-70s.
“ During the period of my affiliation with MaDAf, I will extend my previous research by pursuing several lines of inquiry: 1) the relationship between cannabis and mental illness as imagined/described in popular, psychiatric, political discourse in Senegal since 1960, 2) the life and work of Senegalese psychiatrist Moussa Diop (1923-1967), and 3) the patient-run newspaper (Pinthioum Fann) that was produced at Fann during the 1970s. ”