FREE INTERNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP

BEYOND DISORDER – ANXIETY AS A WAY OF ORDERING

Anxiety is at the center of global health concerns. Numerous large-scale surveys, measuring the health burden on global, regional, and national levels have reported anxiety as a leading mental health issue, especially among youth. In light of these reports, but also in response to the swelling of popular and clinical discourse on anxiety, this workshop asks participants to engage with a new way to think through and with anxiety: How does anxiety operate as an undiagnosed form of collective existence in a highly unstable world? What would be the therapeutic implications of de-articulating anxiety from the self (as a “problem” or a “disorder”) and relocating it in the collective?

In this workshop, we problematize existing anxiety paradigms that dominate academic literatures or popular media discourses, usually appearing as the coinage “The Age of Anxiety,” or as a synonym for worry and uncertainty. Instead, we wish to explore anxiety as an analytical compass that helps capture historical and cultural continuities in diverse social fields, in order to deepen our understanding of what bridges affect and semiosis on the one hand, but also to further our analysis of the individual-collective nexus on the other. In other words, we seek to approach anxiety as a general element of being human, and as it emerges in the context of people’s everyday lives, not as a disorder but as a way of ordering (Hejtmanek, in press).

Project in cooperation with the University of Szeged and the Free University of Tbilisi

Hybrid format

On site : SFU Paris campus

Online : Zoom

Download the program : (here)

Registrations : info@sfu-paris.fr