Psychiatric Categories as Traveling Objects

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Heinz Bude
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 384705752

The proposed project looks at the practices in which non-psychatric disciplines solidify psychiatric disease categories. Taking up the debate on the massive extension of psychiatric diagnoses (Jacobi 2009; Dellwing/Harbusch 2013), it aims to study the path these disease categories take from their academic and medical production through institutional arenas in situations of social work, education, and consulting to individual and private contexts. Sociology has long been critical of psychiatry; however, these critical debates have failed to discuss how the reproduction of psychiatric categories is not a monopoly of psychiatry, the discourse in which is often academic and reflected, but of these secondary institutions in everyday life. Not only are they subject to different political pressures; they also wield wide-ranging powers of social control (Groenemeyer/Rosenbauer 2010: 61) that are not present in everyday life- or academic interactions (Liebsch/Manz 2007). They are troubled persons industries (Gusfield 1989) with the ability to turn abstract academic categories into concrete aggrieved victims of these categorizations (Groenemeyer 2010: 15), to turn academic formulas into individual narratives. The project uses the Czarniawska´s term traveling objects to analyze psychiatric categories to show how institutions and individuals develop and pass them on, how they structurally shift on their path through strategic contexts, and how they gain lives of their own.The results will allow a new approach to the sociology of psychiatry as well as to disease constructions themselves. For one, the project picks up on a new American debate on psychiatry that has been largely absent from the German discourse; also, it re-engages the sociology of the uses of science, Verwendungsforschung (Beck/Bonß 1985). The projects aims to uncover a reflexive trap in self-enlightenment: it proposes to not only connect academically developed to institutionally used knowledge, but also to individually believed knowledge to uncover not just the uses of knowledge, but the achievement of knowledge-construction in deeply contextual environments with contextually stable and fixed problems that need solving.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants