The Anthropology Department would like to announce a new course being introduced for the Spring 2026 semester: Madness in The Welfare City: Freedom and Capture in American Social Service Systems (Anthropology BC3242).
You can find further information about the course down below as well as here!
Madness in the Welfare City: Freedom and Capture in American Social Service Systems examines how contemporary welfare and nonprofit public health, housing, and mental health systems shape daily life and inner worlds. The course explores the psychic life of social service systems where care is often delivered by intermediary nonprofits. We examine how clients come to feel and/or understand that money is made off them, that they are being surveilled, manipulated, or disappeared inside care systems; and how these understandings and attendant feelings reflect the extraction and opacity characteristic of devolved social service systems.
Moving across ethnography, political anthropology, and psychoanalytic readings, we ask how these systems produce forms of distress that may appear as paranoia, withdrawal, or deadly forms of self-harm. How are madness and reason, greed and altruism, freedom and captivity, distributed in encounters with care providers on the ground?
By the end of the course, students will be able to connect political economy, affect theory, and psychoanalytic approaches to understand how decentralized welfare regimes alternately trap and exclude clients—a process that can be experienced as madness itself. Students will map a local care system for their final project.
