Nancy Luxon
Fellow 2025-2026
Nancy Luxon‘s work within critical theory analyses the possibility for agency under conditions of hierarchy and domination. Two dimensions animate this research: first, the politics of ordinary people, and second, the politics of anticolonial struggle in North Africa and France. The politics of ordinary people analyses how our orienting political and moral principles shift when we self-consciously theorise from the perspective of those marginalised; this research culminated in Crisis of Authority (2013), Archives of Infamy (2019), and new editions of Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families (2016) and Discourse and Truth (2019). Her current work on the politics of anticolonial struggle ranges from the surveillance of anticolonial resistance in 1920s and 1930s Paris, to the use of radical psychiatry to create new social “infrastructure” in psychiatric hospitals in France, North Africa, and Harlem. Luxon’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the University of Chicago’s Society of Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been published most recently in Theory, Culture, and Society, as well as in Inquiry, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, PS, and Perspectiveson Politics.
Abstract
Alienation, Disalienation, and Freedom
What does it mean to practice psychiatry within structures that organise and reinforce the exclusions of colonialism? I turn to 1950s French psychiatry and colonial medicine to explore the ways that psychiatric trauma was variously defined, treated, and connected to anticolonial politics in North Africa. Conceptually, colonial trauma or aliénation, was connected to notions of legal minority and the subordinate legal status of women, colonised subjects, and the so-called mad or aliéné. It drew together legal and medical definitions of responsibility, property-ownership, and political agency. In this context, psychiatric hospitals would seem to attest to the morbidity of colonial order (Memmi 1957, Marriott 2018). However, radical psychiatrists in France and North Africa sought to rethink the social and institutional organisation of the psychiatric hospital along with its knowledge and practices (Gibson and Beneduce 2017), to make the hospital the site of a potentially transformative set of clinical interventions (Robcis 2016, Vergès 1996). In so doing, the relationship between clinical and political spaces became more frictive and altered the work of the hospital as a social institution. New questions emerged: How might patients differently orient themselves to social context rather than personal history? And how could hospital infrastructure do more than acclimate patients to hierarchy (Saloua Stuber 2015, Lazali 2021)? This book-length project moves from sites in metropolitan France, to North Africa, and to America’s Harlem to analyse the social infrastructures that organise the intersection of politics and psychiatry in the service of new political conceptions of freedom.
Education
PhD Political Science, University of California, San Diego, United States
BA International Relations, Stanford University, United States
Most Recent Academic Position
Associate Professor Political Science, University of Minnesota, United States
Most Recent Publications
“Fanon’s Psychiatric Hospital as a Waystation to Freedom.” Theory, Culture & Society 38 no. 5 (2021): 93–113.
ed.: Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
ed.: Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.