Publications by authors named "Whitney L Duncan"

In this paper, we explore the material and symbolic effects of "deservingness projects" (Kline, 2019) for Latinx immigrants as they have played out over the COVID-19 pandemic. On a material level, exclusionary policies have exacerbated Latinx immigrants' disenfranchisement and contributed to disproportionate sickness and economic strife during the pandemic. On a symbolic level, they have contributed to subjective experiences of fear, distress, and desperation, and have eroded many immigrants' trust in institutions and support systems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In this article, we investigate how an increasingly popular therapeutic modality, family constellation therapy (FCT), functions simultaneously as a technology of the self (Foucault, Technologies of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988) as well as what we here call a "technology of the social." In FCT, the self is understood as an assemblage of ancestral relationships that often creates problems in the present day. Healing this multi-generational self involves identifying and correcting hidden family dynamics in high-intensity group sessions where other participants represent the focus client and his/her family members, both alive and deceased.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This article examines experiences of returned migrants seeking mental health care at the public psychiatric hospital in Oaxaca, Mexico. Approximately one-third of the hospital's patients have migration experience, and many return to Oaxaca due to mental health crises precipitated by conditions of structural vulnerability and "illegality" in the United States. Once home, migrants, their families, and their doctors struggle to interpret and allay these "transnational disorders"-disorders structurally produced and personally experienced within the borders of more than one country.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF