Invisible Marginalities: madness and deinstitutionalisation in austerity Britain

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

How can one study the geography of invisibility? My project examines how particular marginalities are made invisible in statistics, official discourse andsocial theory, by examining the deinstitutionalised mentally ill. The aim is to uncover the relationship between invisibility in discourse, and marginality.My contention is that this invisibility has real-world consequences. By refusing to recognise the existence of particular groups, liberal states are able towithdraw their rights. I want to find out which social roles the deinstitutionalised mentally ill are being forced to inhabit (addicts; drunks; homeless etc) inorder to understand how this loss of rights is made ethically 'sensible'. To explore this, I am proposing a long-term ethnographic study of people whohave been 'squeezed out' of mental health services as a result of austerity. Undertaking the challenging task of tracing people who were formerlyinstitutionalised but whom mental health services have lost contact with, I intend to reveal the mechanisms that make these individuals invisible, andthe consequences of this. By producing the first study of austerity-driven deinstitutionalisation, my aim is to make an original contribution to literatureexploring the production of marginality. This literature has tended to focus on spatial concentrations of marginalised bodies in asylums and urbanspaces; by contrast, my focus is on the role played by dispersal and disappearance.