Abstrakt:

Starting from the work carried out with immigrants met in Italy at the Fanon Center over the last thirty years, the seminar aims to explore the promises of a critical ethnopsychiatry that recognizes psychological suffering as a prism of political conflicts and historical traumas. From this premise arises the possibility of imagining, both in research and in clinical practice, antidotes to the various expressions of the epistemic violence of dominant categories.  

Bio:  

Roberto Beneduce, PhD, MD, anthropologist and psychiatrist, is full professor of anthropology at the University of Turin, and founder of the Frantz Fanon Center (Turin-Naples), a centre devoted to research and clinical intervention on migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. His research engages various intellectual terrains and fields, including history of ethnopsychiatry, migration and refugee issues, local epistemologies, violence and the religious imaginaries in sub-Saharan Africa, and the role of local healing knowledge in the treatment of mental disorders. He has published in different journals (Politique africaine, Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology, Journal des Africanistes, Ethnologie française, Cahiers d’Anthropologie sociale, Social Compass, Cahiers d’études africaines). He is the author of Un lugar en el mundo. Senderos de la migración entre violencia, memoria y deseo (2015), L’histoire au corps. Mémoires indociles et archives du désordre dans les cultes de possession en Afrique (2016), Il rancore del tempo. Follia, cura e violenza sull’altopiano dogon (Mali) (2025), and - with N. Gibson - Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (2017).
 
Simona Taliani (PhD, anthropologist and psychotherapist) is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Naples, L'Orientale. She has given courses on Anthropology of Childhood and Critical Anthropology of Migration at the University of Turin, and she is currently professor of Ethnopsychiatry at the University of Palermo. She has conducted field research in Cameroon, Mozambique and Burkina Faso on the transformation of the local health care system; and in Italy among Nigerian immigrant women on fetishes, ritual and debt. Since 2009 she also practices as psychoanalytic psychotherapist, after four years of training at Laboratorio Freudiano (Milan/Paris). She actively collaborates with the Frantz Fanon Center in Turin and Naples since 1996. She has published on Africa, Ethnography, African Studies Review, Journal des Africanistes, Cahiers d’études africaines, Social Compass, Politique africaine, Ethnologie française, Calibán (Revista oficial de la Federación Psicoanalítica de América Latina).