Research profile: Gabriel Abarca-Brown
In January, DECOLMAD was joined by two exceptional researchers – Shilpi Rajpal and Gabriel Abarca-Brown. In the next two blogs, we will introduce their research profiles, projects and achievements.
Gabriel Abarca-Brown
Gabriel is a social researcher interested in the intersections between psy-disciplines, global mental health, subjectivity and everyday life in Latin America. He focuses on the multiple interactions between “psy” technologies and different health knowledge, practices and values, highlighting transcultural, intersectional and decolonial aspects involved. Gabriel has a background in Psychology (University of Santiago). He holds a MA in Adult Clinical Psychology with a specialisation in Psychoanalysis (University of Chile) and a PhD in Anthropology (Dept of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London). He has worked as a lecturer at the Dept of Psychology and the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of Santiago; and the Dept of Sociology at the University of Chile. Besides, Gabriel has worked as a collaborator in health and intercultural issues at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO).
Currently, he is a Research Associate at the Research Programme in History and Critical Theory of Psy Knowledge at Diego Portales University and a Research Associate at the Transdisciplinary Laboratory in Social Practices and Subjectivity (LaPSoS) at the University of Chile.
Current research
Gabriel is working on his current book manuscript entitled “Becoming a (neuro)migrant: Culture, race, class and gender in Santiago, Chile”. Based on a multi-site ethnography carried out over 16 months in a borough of north Santiago, Gabriel seeks to interrogate how new discourses relating to migration, multiculturalism and mental health have taken shape in a post-dictatorship neoliberal Chile from 1990 to the present. Specifically, he explores how, through the introduction of health reforms since the 1990s and the subsequent global mental health (GMH) agenda, biomedicine and psy technologies have impacted and shaped afro-descendant migrants’ subjectivities and everyday lives.
Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, Gabriel argues that there are multiple forms of becoming a (neuro)migrant in a post-dictatorship neoliberal Chile. Through the negotiation, assimilation, resistance, and refusal of biomedical and psychiatric interventions, migrants engage in heterogeneous subjectivation processes that both affirm and challenge normative values of integration into Chilean society. These subjectivation processes reveal that psy technologies challenge migrants' representations of themselves, their malaise and suffering, as well as their mental health.
Besides, these processes also reveal how Haitians and Dominicans develop individual, family and community coping strategies to address their afflictions in spaces such as neighbourhoods and churches mainly. He also shows that although local initiatives in multiculturalism have encouraged health practitioners to reconsider their practices and values reflexively, they tended to racialise the notion of “cultural difference” and abnormality/madness. Practitioners have usually reduced migrants' malaise and suffering to a neurobiological level, neglecting the ethnic and contextual aspects involved. Through this, they reproduce and reinforce a conception of afflictions based on a biosocial determinism framed in what some researchers have called the neuroscience of poverty.
Participaction in DECOLMAD
In the DECOLMAD project, Gabriel will dive into the history of transcultural psychiatry in Chile and, by extension, in Latin America from 1950 to the present. His project will show how psy-practitioners developed proto-transcultural psychiatry before the irruption of the civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) and the introduction of biological psychiatry.
The project will be divided into three periods. In the first period (from 1950 to 1973), it will explore how the expansion of healthcare services across the country in the ’50 brought with it the encounter of health practitioners with indigenous communities such as Aymara and Mapuche mainly, as well as the emergence of transcultural issues in mental health. Gabriel will highlight how this period is marked by a dialogue between European and US-American psy knowledge, local systems of healing, and Latin American critical traditions such as Liberation Psychology and Pedagogy of Oppressed.
In the second period (1973-1990), it will analyse how the introduction of biological psychiatry veiled the initial developments in transcultural psychiatry in a second-place position. Gabriel will stress how researchers and psy-practitioners found other conceptual and methodological means through which they re-defined the relationships between culture, race and class and mental health. In the last period (1990 to the present), it will explore how, in the context of what some researchers have called neoliberal multiculturalism, the “intercultural” health policies oriented to indigenous and Latin American and Caribbean migrants have promoted health approaches such as the cultural competency model, neglecting Latin American approaches (e.g., Latin American Social Medicine, Community Psychology).