Paola Juan is a postdoctoral assistant at Johannes Quack's Chair. She will pursue postdoctoral research at ISEK on the transmission of intergenerational care practices, alternative psychiatric services, and religious traditions in Geel, Belgium. Geel is historically significant in terms of the links between the emergence of healthcare institutions, their models and philosophies of care, and religion. The city is renowned for its alternative approach to psychiatric care, which involves a family care system that has existed since medieval times. This care model originated in connection with the pilgrimage to the tomb of the Christian Saint Dympna, who is the patron saint of people suffering from mental illness. Her legend dates back to the 13th century, and pilgrimages began in the 15th century. Despite the unique psychiatric structures that make Geel a historically important place, little anthropological research has been published on the topic to date. For this project, the focus will be on the (non)transmission of intergenerational care practices, and on their reimplementation in contemporary Geel following the UNESCO recognition of this care model as intangible cultural heritage in 2023.

She is currently finishing a PhD co-supervised by Prof. Irene Becci (ISSR, University of Lausanne) and Dr. Aude Fauvel (MER, IHM, CHUV-University of Lausanne). It was also supervised by Prof. Tanya Luhrmann during her Mobi.Doc stay at Stanford, US.

Her PhD thesis is titled “On Freedom and Madness: Affects, psychiatry and territories in the Swiss Alps”. The research examines forms of freedom, care and affect at the interface between psychiatric services, communities and non-profit associations in a rural region of Switzerland. It looks at how forms of freedom emerge in spaces where constraint often is central. It asks how freedom and constraint are entangled in these caring relationships, and how they participate in shaping divergent ideological views regarding what constitutes good care for people diagnosed with mental disorders. The thesis investigates different facets of the term freedom which become evident on the ethnographic level, and coalesce into a typology. It shows how these views depend on the social and affective structures in which one is enmeshed, and how they consequently lead to different viewpoints regarding what good care consists of. This research delves into these questions in relation to the specific philosophy of care developed within this particular psychiatric institution, located in a deeply Catholic region. These services are based on ‘humanistic’ forms of care and non-biomedical principles for people who are recurrently hospitalised into psychiatry. Heterogeneous visions of care and freedom are explored in relation to local catholic, anarchist and counter-hegemonic cultures, as well as legal, medical and users’/patients’ perspectives.

Paola Juan studied at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne (BA) and at the London School of Economics (MSc), where she received the Maurice Freedman prize (2018) for the best PhD dissertation in Social Anthropology.