CAMHRA Annual Lecture 2026 presented by Professor Clara Han

Professor Clara Han presents the CAMHRA Annual Lecture 2026, “From me it is born”: Psychic life and a politics of the ordinary, accompanied by a pre-lecture reception open to attendees

The CAMHRA Annual Lecture is a landmark event in the Centre’s calendar, bringing together scholars, practitioners, partners and community members to reflect critically on emerging questions in mental health. Each year, the lecture offers a space for dialogue across disciplines, opening new ways of thinking about how mental health is shaped, understood and transformed in everyday life.

Professor Clara Han (Professor of Anthropology at John Hopkins University) will deliver the CAMHRA Annual Lecture. "From me it is born": Psychic life and a politics of the ordinary, traces the tensions between cruelty and care in a world marked by violence, developing questions that unsettle disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and mental health research. Welcoming Professor Han will be Dr Bhrigupati Singh, who presented CAMHRA’s inaugural lecture last year.

We will also be announcing the recipient of the CAMHRA Annual Book Prize, which highlights and fosters original thought at the intersection of anthropology and mental health research, following the conceptual theme set each year by the CAMHRA Annual Lecture.

Lecture Abstract

“In this lecture, I am concerned with the mismatch of cruelty and care in a world at war. Developing questions that seem to me to stand before any strict disciplinary boundaries between professional anthropology and mental health research, I ask: What must we attend to to see the possibility for care in contexts marked by a cruelty that has been exercised to precisely corrode the connection with oneself? What is the nature of care here? I turn to the women whom I came to know in a neighborhood marked by pervasive police violence, describing how their acknowledgment of the singularity of a life might be a guide for our own intellectual labor.”

Pre-lecture Reception

Join us from 5pm for a reception in the Paul Wembley Wing of Senate House at SOAS. Celebrate with CAMHRA team members, researchers, fellows, and partners from London, across the UK, and around the world. Light food and drink will be provided.

Speaker

Professor Clara Han is a Professor of Anthropology at John Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA). Her research investigates the intersections of neighbourhood, medical and legal institutions, and intimate life in contexts marked by both the slow, corrosive violence of economic precarity and the catastrophic violence of torture, extrajudicial killing and war.

Two thematic clusters that cross-cut anthropology undergird this research: first, the experience of illness in contexts marked by economic deprivation; and second, the articulation of violence, affliction, and kinship. She has conducted research over many years in low-income neighborhoods in Santiago, Chile, and more recently in Korea.

She is the author of Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile and Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War, awarded the 2022 Association for Feminist Anthropology Senior Book Prize and a finalist for the 2022 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.

CAMHRA

Further information available on the CAMHRA website.

Image: created with CAMHRA brand kit