Embedded Files
In a time when autocracy looms over America, it seems necessary, if not urgent, to ask what kind of madness matters. What actions do our times demand when derangement is embraced as leadership and leadership is transformed into violence? At what point does madness become a justification for legitimizing oppression? What insights can creative inquiry provide about whose anger goes unheard and whose is celebrated? How might madness, both as a concept and practice, prompt us to rethink what it means to be a political actor, a critical researcher, and a person whose rights, identity, and existence in this world are recognized and validated?
The presentations in this forum delve into the nuances of critique to consider what an alternative political practice could entail, where matter and materiality are unruly, insanity escapes pathologization, and anger is embraced. Our speakers push the boundaries of research, engaging inventive methods to embrace mad matters. Join us in an exploration of collaborative sensorial political art, an analysis of community activism amid the pathologization of Mexicanness in Texas during the ‘60s and ‘70s, a DJ set as an ethnographic dispatch of the queer underground, and a contestation to white power through an analysis of a civil rights lawyer’s self-professed “weird psychological makeup.”
The 2025 American Studies Forum, Mad Matters, is organized by Valentina Ramia, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies at Wesleyan University.
Ramia's work is situated at the intersection between medicine and law, with particular attention to questions about the relationship between personhood, mental illness, and the representation of violence. Valentina’s current book project examines how fear is interpreted in U.S. immigration law. Her research is based on several years of ethnographic participation as a Spanish-English interpreter on asylum seekers’ legal teams in New York. Her investigation moves across the different legal presentations of fear—well-founded, credible, reasonable, subjective, and objective—to address the impact of broader American narratives of fact-making, reasonability, and worthiness on the assessment of asylum applications. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Valentina had a career in politics and public policy in Ecuador. She is also a classically trained pianist.
Report abuse