Reconstructing Harry: a genealogical study of a colonial family 'inside' and 'outside' the Grahamstown Asylum, 1888-1918.

Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the late nineteenth century, where families actively participated in the processes of custodial care, committal, treatment and release of their relatives. This paper works in this historical field, but with some methodological and theoretical differences. The Foucauldian study is anchored to a single case and family as an illness narrative that moves cross-referentially between bureaucratic state archival material, psychiatric case records, and intergenerational family-storytelling and family photographs.

Parental communication with children about sex in the South African HIV epidemic: raced, classed and cultural appropriations of Lovelines.

Responsive to perceived high risk of HIV infection by sexually active youth, several South African sexual health-promotion campaigns have used media targeting mothers, instructing them on how sex should be talked about with their children to 'risk-proof' them. A Foucauldian approach to the normative apparatus of family-sexuality-risk finds mothers positioned as pivots between 'public' (health, economy, culture) and 'private' (family, childrearing, sex) apparatuses, tasked with appropriately socialising a new generation of sexually responsible, HIV-free citizens. This paper uses a reading of interactive discourse from (racially and gender) mixed groups of parents who, as professionals and postgraduate students in a university context, discussed their own childrearing practices in response to a particular didactic media text about sex-communication.

Discourses of culture and illness in South African mental health care and indigenous healing, Part II: African mentality.

This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychiatrists, psychologists and indigenous healers as they discuss possibilities for collaboration in South African mental health care. Disjunctive versions of what 'culture' is in relation to the illness of a person form an important site for the negotiation of power relations between mental health practitioners and indigenous healers. The results of this study are presented in two parts.

Discourses of culture and illness in South African mental health care and indigenous healing, Part I: Western psychiatric power.

This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychiatrists, psychologists and indigenous healers as they discuss possibilities for collaboration in South African mental health care. Versions of 'culture', and disputes over what constitutes 'disorder', are an important site for the negotiation of power relations between mental health practitioners and indigenous healers. The results of this study are presented in two parts.