Élodie Edwards-Grossi

Élodie Edwards-Grossi, Ph.D, is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Sociology at Université Paris Dauphine. 

She obtained the agrégation in English in 2014, and from January 2015 to December 2016 she was Visiting Graduate Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the research center EpiDaPo (UCLA-CNRS). In 2017-2018, she received the Fulbright and Georges Lurcy fellowships to complete her dissertation at Tulane University and was affiliated to the department of History as a Visiting Research Fellow. In 2018-2019, she was a temporary lecturer of American Studies at Université Versailles St Quentin-en-Yvelines. From 2019 to 2021, she was an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. 

Her research focuses on the social history of racialized psychiatry in the segregated South and the medicalization of the black body from the 19th century until the contemporary era. 

Email: 

elodie.edwards-grossi[at]dauphine.psl.eu    

Research Interests

U.S. Social History, ethnography, urban sociology, African American History, biologism, racial science, social control, racialization processes, norms, psychiatry, popular music studies

Dissertation and doctoral research

Title: "Bad Brains" : Race et Psychiatrie de la fin de l'esclavage à l'époque contemporaine aux États-Unis

The dissertation was awarded the following prizes: 

Prix de thèse AFEA - Fulbright 2020

Prix de thèse SHS-PSL 2019, dans la catégorie interface science/humanités

Mention spéciale 2019 du Prix de la SFHM en histoire de la médecine Georges Robert (sciences humaines en médecine)

Abstract: This dissertation explores the social history of racialized psychiatry in the segregated South and the medicalization of the black body from the 19th century to contemporary times. By examining the politicization of science and psychiatric practices, while paying attention to notions of citizenship, responsibility and civil rights, it is possible to better understand the history of black psychiatric patients in the United States and the evolution of psychiatric theories that target racial otherness. Based on the personal archives of physicians, the records of care institutions and research centers in psychiatry, as well as on qualitative fieldwork conducted with psychiatrists in California, this dissertation shows the long history of racial discrimination practiced in medicine in the United States and the construction of a “medical apartheid” in Southern Hospitals since the late 19th century. This work retraces the different regimes by which the notion of race has been deemed relevant by psychiatrists to naturalize bodily differences from slavery up to the present day. While the racial variable began to be used in studies of madness from the 1840s onward, this dissertation reveals the emergence of a classification system for pathologies and routines applied to black and white bodies by Southern alienists, who sought to constrain and “heal” black bodies in separate spaces. By developing social psychiatry and by establishing the first urban clinics in the black ghettos in the context of the Great Migration, psychiatrists in the North also tried to condemn to obsolescence the segregated institutions of the South, and to reaffirm the modernity of their own practices. Moreover, in the context of the 1960s, this work shows the intersection between, on the one hand, the growing politicization of research conducted by psychiatrists on urban violence and, on the other hand, the representation of black protesters as pathological in the medical literature. Finally, this work addresses the emergence of anti-racist psychiatry during the beginnings of deinstitutionalization and focuses on the issues of the development of psychiatric units in which psychiatrists developed, from the 1980s onward, a new approach, placing the notion of race, understood as a biological and cultural paradigm, at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship. The qualitative survey conducted in one of these units and in several care clinics in California reveals the complex and often contradictory social representations of race that exist today for American psychiatrists, for whom this variable is understood simultaneously as a biomedical variable and as a cultural and social construct. By combining historical research on care practices with empirical methods of sociology, this dissertation demonstrates that the memory of race has long irrigated the discourses and practices of the American psychiatric profession: it is prevalent in the representations that the doctors employ when describing the bodies they treat, and it has contributed to no small degree in the naturalization of the social that has accompanied patient care.