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By Aidan Seale-Feldman, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer, Bioethics Program, University of Virgina.

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Abstract:

What does it mean to lose a world? And what role might psychosocial counselling play in repairing a world destroyed? In the Spring of 2015, as I was conducting fieldwork, Nepal was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and 7.3 magnitude aftershock. Over 9,000 people died and half a million lost their homes. In response to the seismic rupture, humanitarian psychosocial projects arrived with funding to mitigate an emergent 鈥渕ental health crisis鈥� in a country where mental health had not yet been incorporated into the health care system. As psychosocial counselors flooded the 14 affected districts, over 300,000 鈥渂eneficiaries鈥� received psychiatric and psychosocial support services, many for the first time in their lives. Based on collaborative ethnographic research alongside a leading Nepali NGO, this talk follows individual and group counseling sessions in an earthquake-affected region where the ground had not yet stopped shaking. Landslides, aftershocks, and the ongoing deconstruction of the earth generated existential dizziness and discussions about the nature of the world, sansar. Assembled in the midst of ruins and rubble, group counselling sessions did not primarily operate as conduits of 鈥渢herapeutic governance,鈥� but as sites of geophilosophy where people dreamed, despaired, and critically reflected on existence. By attending to the relational dimensions of the therapeutic encounter and the forms of thought that emerge in response to a trembling world, this talk reconsiders anthropological and philosophical reflections on life, world, and loss in times of disaster.

Bio:

Aidan Seale-Feldman is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Virginia. Her work explores the ethics, politics, and psychic life of disaster. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Nepal before and after the 2015 earthquakes, her research focuses on the biopolitics of mental health governance, the existential dimensions of disaster, and the forms of care that emerge in disaster鈥檚 wake. In Nepal, she has also conducted research on gender, 鈥渕ass hysteria,鈥� and the movement of affliction across bodies, worlds, and generations. For the past two years she has served as co-editor of Screening Room, an experimental ethnographic film series hosted on the Society for Cultural Anthropology鈥檚 Visual and New Media Review. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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