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VERSION:2.0
PRODID:icalendar-ruby
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:“I am saying take the medicine”: Psychopharmaceutical Subj
 ectivities in Contemporary Maldives
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261017T120644Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_51497920366517
DTSTART:20260323T161500Z
DTEND:20260323T171500Z
DESCRIPTION:Talk by Anu Ahmed (Anthropology\, University of Rochester)\n\n 
 \n\nThe Republic of Maldives has been undergoing rapid social transformati
 ons since the country’s democratization in 2008. A decade later yielded 
 the Maldives’ ‘psy’ turn when\, starting at the end of 2018\, the in
 coming President prioritized mental health care as the focus of his modern
 ization project. Public and private services offering psychiatry have sinc
 e proliferated\, and psychopharmaceuticals today circulate rapidly through
  formal and informal networks. How is this state-sponsored “biotechnical
  embrace” (Delvecchio Good 2007) lived? Many Sunni-Maldivian individuals
  describe psychopharmaceuticals as a medical technology that assists in co
 ntaining what are deemed excessive subjectivities\, while many others crit
 icize psychopharmaceuticals as producing the very excesses that it is mean
 t to contain. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Greater Male’ Region
  of the Maldives from mid-2020 through 2021\, this talk explores how patie
 nts and kin navigate these competing discourses in an urban landscape that
  is unevenly marred by histories of dispossession and structural violence.
  Through person-centered narratives\, this talk shows how the institutiona
 lization of psychopharmaceuticals has reconfigured what counts as illness 
 and care in the present as well as in the proximate and distant past. Atte
 nding to these entangled temporalities in individuals’ narratives illumi
 nates how psychopharmaceutical technologies provide “ethical affordances
 ” (Keane 2015) through which people posit themselves and others as moral
  persons in the contemporary moment.\n\n \n\nAnu Ahmed is an Assistant Pro
 fessor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. She is a medical an
 d psychological anthropologist who examines how people understand and expe
 rience subjective distress\, such as madness\, and how emergent institutio
 ns and cultural discourses shape new moral and phenomenological worlds. He
 r work is situated in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives\, where s
 he was born and raised.
GEO:42.447296;-76.482254
LOCATION:Uris Hall\, G08
SUMMARY:“I am saying take the medicine”: Psychopharmaceutical Subjectiv
 ities in Contemporary Maldives
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.cornell.edu/event/i-am-saying-take-the-medicin
 e
CATEGORIES:Seminar
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