Dipartimento di Studi Storici

Turin, 10-11 October 2024
CFP deadline: 15th April 2024

For a long time, psychiatric hospitals were enclosed places, not only for people that were hospitalised but also in the public’s perception. In Italy, mainly from the late 1960s, public imagination began to change, thanks to the actions of the anti-institutional movement and reformist psychiatrists, together with the “voices” that started to cross the material and immaterial walls of psychiatric hospitals. The words of the inmates, women and men whose “subjectivity was finally restored”, began to spread and be heard, along with those who criticized the “total institution” and worked to revolutionize cultures of mental illness while altering practices of care. At different times, such testimonies produced various memories of liberation from within the asylum—individual and collective memories shaped by specific groups, dependent on personal and professional experience and political involvement. All these were cultivated by specific communities of remembrance, conditioned by gender identities, tied to specific places, disseminated through particular devices, channels, and communication tools—which in turn influenced the formation of collective narratives and public memories.

The conference focuses on the memories and narratives around practices of deinstitutionalization in Italy and it aims to discuss forms and times through which individual stories and personal testimonies of the asylum, and its overcoming, have been collected and used from the 1960s to date. The “voices” – recorded, transcribed, and disseminated before, during, and after the closure of psychiatric hospitals – belong to patients, medical staff, social workers, administrators, members of associations and cooperatives, journalists, writers, directors, artists, political activists, architects, and designers. They have been called upon to discuss the transformation of spaces and, later on, their repurposing. To these are added the voices of those, who, for many reasons and from different perspectives, had lived, in whole or part, through the long history of Italian deinstitutionalization.

The conference aims to survey the forms of use of the witnesses’ "voices" in the narrative of deinstitutionalization, with the aim to reconstruct when and how they have been collected and used, to understand why they managed to go beyond the walls of psychiatric hospitals and to overcome stigma, to interpret to what extent they contributed to redefining the inside-outside relationship (between asylum and society) and, finally, to analyse the mechanisms through which they have become memories. Overall, the purpose of the conference is to reflect on the nature of the public memory of deinstitutionalization and to study, by comparison, the genesis and morphologies of individual and collective memories. Moreover, it seeks to highlight gender, geographical, and chronological connotations, as well as examining their circulation (both in Italy and abroad), reception, and forms of intergenerational transmission.

Papers from scholars in various disciplinary fields are warmly welcome.
Please submit a title, an abstract (maximum 2000 characters), and a brief CV of the author by April 15, 2024, to davide.tabor@unito.it with the subject "CFP Memories of Deinstitutionalization in Italy".
The papers will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee, and the responses will be communicated by May 15, 2024.
Some selected contributions, reviewed and revised as essays, will be published in a collective book.

The conference is part of the actions of the PRIN 2022 “Narration and care. The deinstitutionalization of the psychiatric system in Italy: history, imagery, projects (from 1961 to the present)”, organized by the Department of Letters, Languages, and Cultural Heritage at the University of Cagliari, the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Turin, and the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge at the University of Pisa.

Scientific Committee
Daniela Adorni, Eleonora Belligni, Chiara Bombardieri, Barbara Bosi, Giovanni Contini, Giovanni Vito Distefano, Giovanni Durbiano, Vinzia Fiorino, John Foot, Marina Guglielmi, Stefano Magagnoli, Gianluigi Mangiapane, Filippo M. Paladini, Elena Petricola, Giuseppina Scavuzzo, Davide Tabor