Luxon awarded Visiting Scholar and Senior Fellowship opportunities

During March 2025, Professor Nancy Luxon will be at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) a Visiting Scholar in residence in support of her research on infrastructures of colonialism as exemplified by architecture, psychiatric practice, and political position of Fanon's psychiatric hospitals in Algeria and Tunisia. Following her time at the CHR, Luxon will begin a Senior Fellowship to the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) - Leuphana that will support research towards her book project examining the intersection of radical psychiatry and politics in moments of political and social transformation.

Reorientation and Exploration

Since 2016 Luxon's research has been oriented to the connections between French political thought and anticolonial struggle in North Africa. In this work, she considers what it means to empower people for political agency in a hierarchical, racialized colonial context, where they are seen as "objects" of power, not "subjects" capable of acting in their own right.

Motivated by these questions, Luxon has embarked on a book project, tentatively titled "Alienation, Disalienation, and Freedom," which "looks at the institution of the psychiatric hospital and its instantiation in several different sites, across the 20th century." She is investigating radical psychiatry as it was practiced in 1950s France and how it was extended and further developed in Algeria, Tunisia, and French North Africa. Her work also examines a series of African-American clinics that sprung up in the United States, inspired by the clinics in North Africa, as a way to think about the psychological effects of slavery and other forms of racial injury. This research is an "opportunity to take seriously the psychiatric hospital as an institution, and to rethink the place for social institutions and infrastructure in political life."

Her work draws on Frantz Fanon to think about the psychiatric hospital as a waystation. "I love working with that metaphor," said Luxon, "because it's a way to think about how we change direction in moments of profound political transformation." Rather than imagining an instantaneous change, the waystation offers an opportunity to slow down and think through the constitutive elements of transformation.

Returning to South Africa

The University of Minnesota's Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) and CHR have a longstanding collaboration, which has afforded Luxon (an ICGC affiliate) the opportunity to attend CHR's Winter School for several years. As she has begun to work closely with many of UWC's faculty and graduate students, she has been invited to spend a month with them. During that time, Luxon will give an invited lecture at Stellenbosch University on material central to her book project. She will also give a work-in-progress lecture at the CHR to think through the material gleaned from recent archival work in France, alongside CHR interlocutors. Furthermore, this will be an opportunity for Luxon to complete some writing for her book manuscript and to receive feedback from Premesh Lalu, Heidi Grunebaum, and Maurits van Bever Donker, among many others.

South Africa is an interesting place, in Luxon's opinion, to have these conversations. "So much of the work in experimental psychology took place in South Africa and was central to the race-thinking that later fed into apartheid projects," she noted, pointing to Lalu's recent "Undoing Apartheid." As an emphatically interdisciplinary space, the CHR is an ideal milieu for rethinking psychology in the postwar moment and how it connects to race, politics, and different kinds of medical and juridical divisions.

The CHR offers a unique backdrop for this work by bringing together different kinds of projects within a single building. There are the usual scholars and researchers doing the usual academic work. But, when walking into the building, the first thing one sees is a workshop with kinetic objects and full-scale puppets. The large-scale puppets "offer a way to visualize and rethink how we relate to the people from our past, from our present and different issues around politics, social change ... to hear a story of human history being told through an inanimate object, manipulated by other people, where you have to take seriously the condition of that dependency." The workshop also reminds visitors to the CHR of the importance of hand, of craft, and of the arts for inquiry into the human.

Next Stop: Germany

Much of Luxon's work at IAS - Leuphana for her Senior Fellowship will be concentrated on writing as she focuses on completing her manuscript. Nonetheless, since the cohort of IAS fellows will be at a public university and an institute committed to North-South relations, they also have the opportunity and resources to organize public-facing events. "I'm looking forward to organizing events that bring together academics like myself," Luxon said, "but also potentially those who are the head curators for the former psychiatric asylum local to Lüneburg" where the history of theses institutions is a sober one.

Luxon also hopes to collaborate with scholars from Latin America similarly preoccupied with questions of infrastructure and who collaborate on popular art and social movements. This collaboration is an opportunity for her to think about how and under what conditions these can offer an infrastructure for collective struggle of different kinds and when they risk cooptation—that is, what does it mean both to mark the challenges to struggle, and yet to reappropriate institutional spaces to build alternative futures that might sustain a new vision for politics.

Twofold Result

The final product of these fellowships is twofold. First, Luxon hopes to complete the first draft of her book and receive feedback from scholars exploring similar questions.

For Luxon, however, the exciting part about this sort of leave is the opportunity to have her own understanding of the world challenged. These fellowships will encourage her to reconsider what she does in the classroom, the books she teaches, the way she teaches, and how students can benefit from her experience. So the second result of this project goes beyond academia—it offers her the chance to bring back these experiences to the citizens of Minnesota.