The Who Cares? Conference series on the history of psychiatry in the English-speaking world will hold its third and final edition on 4–6 March 2027 at Paris Nanterre.

The Who Cares? Conference series on the history of psychiatry in the English-speaking world will hold its third and final edition on 4–6 March 2027 at Paris Nanterre. This year’s conference will focus on the theme “Circulations & Transfers.”

Our confirmed keynote speakers are David Wright (McGill University) and Sloan Mahone (University of Oxford).

We welcome contributions from scholars working on aspects of the conference theme, regardless of career stage. Proposals are invited from PhD students, early-career researchers, and established scholars alike.

We invite proposals addressing “Circulations & Transfers” to be submitted by 20 September 2026.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• “Getting out of the Asylum” : physical transfer and circulations of patients between institutions and other places of care and/or going back home

• Transfers of patients and/or staff initiated in times of crisis or emergency e. g. wartime conditions

• Circulation of professionals/staff from one institution to another / other places of care or confinement

• Circulation of external visitors in and out of institutions (18th-19th-century asylum tourism, journalistic practices, visits from friends and relatives, etc.)

• Circulation of ideas and theories on the treatment of mental illness and diagnostic categories

• Circulation of clinical practices and therapeutic techniques

• The role of translation and language in psychiatry at an international level

• Material histories of psychiatry (circulating objects, drugs, devices, archives)

• Resistance, failure, distortion in the reception and adaptation of ideas/practices

• The construction of local/regional/national/international networks (e.g. international organisations, congresses etc.)

• The politics of dissemination of psychiatric knowledge (media, publishing)

• Colonial and postcolonial circulations of psychiatric knowledge and institutions

• Influence of political opinions on psychiatric practices: no-restraint, therapeutic communities,  anti-psychiatry, care in the community …