Situated Care: Subjectivity, Knowledge, and Labor (SITCARE) develops

• Applicant: Dr. Lauren Cubellis
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550236788

How does the valuation of lived experience as a form of expertise challenge hegemonic discourses around subjectivity, knowledge production, and forms of work? How does the formation of a new kind of care worker shape concerns regarding the burden of global mental health and the labor conditions of the advanced liberal state? To address these questions, the research group, Situated Care: Subjectivity, Knowledge, and Labor (SITCARE) develops anthropological understandings of the relationship between the psyche and society, the contingency of knowledge production, and work and the self in innovative spaces of mental health care. SITCARE focuses on the training and employment of peer support workers (PSWs) across the German-speaking countries. PSWs are individuals with lived experiences as mental health service users who have been trained to offer support to others experiencing psychiatric crises. The training and employment of PSWs offer a critical site at which to examine collective mobilization around previously marginalized identity categories, the changing terms of psychiatric care in the face of an increasing mental health burden and the financial limits of the welfare state, and the reconfiguration of psychiatric crisis from a pathologized illness and disability category to one at the fore of utopian and recovery-oriented mental health movements. The research group will advance disciplinary discussions of subjectivities in formation, situated and local knowledge production, and disability and labor as evolving forms of social participation, care, and control. The research group will engage three key social and scientific objectives: 1 An examination of the ways these systems of knowing are constructed and circulate across the German-speaking region will facilitate broader understandings of the relationship between contested forms of knowing and the politics of decolonizing knowledge. 2. The group will develop an anthropological theory of collective knowledge production based on our encounters with the inclusion of lived experience as a form of expertise, which will speak to broader social and scientific concerns regarding ways of knowing, the work of research, and contested truths. 3. The group will generate an ethnographically grounded, analytical model for critically evaluating the inclusion of peer support worker roles in psychiatric care. This analysis will support broader international practice and policy discussions regarding this intervention, and more nuanced understandings of how those roles are shaped by and in response to local conditions.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Groups