A PDF for non-commercial use of my April 11 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Money as Medicine – Clinicism, Cash Transfers, and the Political-Economic Determinants of Health," is available here.
I am a physician-anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health and a psychoanalytic clinician. (My expected PhD completion at Harvard University in 2020 was interrupted by pandemic-related shifts in my research and organizing priorities alongside full-time clinical work; it is now expected in 2024.) My published work has appeared in medical, legal, and humanities journals and in popular media.
In addition to historical and ethnographic scholarship, I conduct policy-focused public health research and policy work, with a particular focus on violence prevention, community mental health systems, and addressing 'carceral-community epidemiology' – that is, how the health and welfare of incarcerated people are always intertwined with that of broader communities. This work examines systemic prejudice in healthcare and legal systems, the uses of confinement and punishment in the US and internationally, and large-scale decarceration policies in relation to public health and safety, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity.
Putting research into practice, I collaborate with and advise public agencies on the design and implementation of non-police shared safety systems, with a focus on building community care worker programs to support individuals following release from jails and prisons as well as broader criminalized communities, including those experiencing homelessness, serious mental illness, and other forms of disability. I welcome new invitations to collaborate on public health, violence prevention, and guaranteed basic income projects.
I am available for discussions with academic, medical, psychoanalytic, public policy, and community organizing groups, with particular focus on the paradigm of 'abolitional care' and the politics of public health, 'mental health,' medical ethics, and policing and prisons. To inquire about possible talks and/or collaborations, please send an email to s.ericreinhart@gmail.com.
Research Agenda
All of my research is motivated by my clinical experiences as well as a decade of sustained ethnographic work on Chicago's South Side and shorter periods of research in India, South Africa, and North Africa and with migrant communities in southern Europe. Based on this ethnographic research alongside multidisciplinary training, my scholarly and applied work proceeds on three interrelated fronts. Each of these attends to questions and action at different scales: the universal, the particular, and the singular.
First, moving between universal and singular modalities of thought, I am completing an historical-ethnographic book project, provisionally titled Subversivity: Race, Psychiatry, and Aesthetic Anteriority. This research traces the constitutive interrelation between modern psychiatric, racial, and aesthetic ideas from their shared origin in 18th-century German anthropology and philosophy to their consequences for everyday practices, psychiatry, prisons, and policing in the US today.
Subversivity is set against a backdrop of the disciplinary formation of urban sociology for which Chicago's racially segregated neighborhoods have been used as laboratory for the production of sociological knowledge for over a century. I argue that such sociological and related anthropological scholarship, alongside the popular media it inspires, has supplied the now-pervasive terms by which these racialized neighborhoods and their residents have come to be understood, both through outside representations and through the languages and life experiences of residents themselves. These discourses have overwhelmingly focused on racializing tropes of violence, social pathology, poverty, the underclass, criminality, trauma, and various forms of psychic and physiological injury. From this vantage, I consider the stakes of aesthetic practices, particularly writing, as a strategy of being-in-language and being-with-others that resists and subverts the pathologizing terms of life that have been inherited from these powerful academic-political discourses and their popular diffusion.
Aesthetics, in this frame, pertains not to the study of art objects and recognized artists. Instead, it follows aesthesis as qualities of feeling that are, by definition in the pivotal articulation of aesthetics by Immanuel Kant, beyond representation and cognition. These qualities of feeling are also necessarily shared with others as the basis of aesthetic community – a unique form of relation with others that enables adjacency, accompaniment, and irreducible difference rather than shared identifications. In order to situate aesthesis in its relation to representation, however, an ethnography of aesthetic dynamics for my interlocutors must account for the specific histories of discourse in relation to which aesthetic practices open to subversion and remaking.
To this end, Subversivity interweaves an ethnography of writing with a deconstructive genealogy of two fundamental discourses that overdetermine the lives of my interlocutors: racial reason and psychiatric rationality. This historical ethnography proceeds from a reexamination of the shared moment of interrelated emergence of racial, psychiatric, and modern aesthetic discourses in eighteenth-century German anthropology and philosophy. These co-constitutive discursive-epistemological structures are then traced forward through American psychiatric theory and practice, the rise of urban sociology, and the development of the governing structures in Chicago today, including the logics of policing and incarceration. In sum, Subversivity endeavors to draw out specific psychosocial and material consequences of racial-psychiatric logics while also demonstrating their always-incomplete power over aesthetic practices.
I am also working on a second monograph, Abolitional Care: From Apartheid to Accompaniment. This project draws together traditions of social medicine, critical psychiatry, public health, political economy, and the history of abolitional struggle against slavery, asylums, and prisons to develop a political paradigm of care oriented around three key concepts: anti-apartheid, abolition, and accompaniment.
The second front of my scholarship attends to the particular and makes use of methods from epidemiology and econometrics alongside additional policy-oriented empirical methods that seek to directly address the governing structures that bear down on marginalized individual's life chances and understandings of themselves. Much of this work is conducted in in collaboration with a team of researchers and international partnerships at the Data and Evidence for Justice Reform (DE JURE) program, previously housed at The World Bank Research Group. This work seeks to critically evaluate and produce programmatic resources for undoing the harms enforced under the rubrics of "economic development" and "law and order," particularly in postcolonial contexts. It attends to structural violence and inequalities in legal systems globally, with particular attention to criminal punishment systems, judicial systems, and political economy. Our projects consider the perceived legitimacy of jurisprudence, the health consequences of policing and incarceration, and the determinants of systematic biases in sentencing decisions and other arenas of judicial decision-making. Several of these projects are coupled with intervention programs that experimentally evaluate the potential of changes to criminal law, guaranteed income programs, machine learning, public data transparency, and personalized data feedback to address class, gender, caste, and ethno-racial biases in legal processes, public health, and policing.
The third dimension of my work – which attends to the singularity of each individual – manifests clinically at the intersection of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, primarily oriented around the work of Freud, Lacan, Fanon, Klein, Bion, and Laplanche. My clinical focus includes working with individuals who have experienced incarceration, torture, war, and/or forced displacement; sexual or violent compulsions; psychoses; and/or who are engaged in the work of art – whether visual, written, aural, or in any other form.
Making use of my native fluency in American Sign Language, I also work with Deaf individuals, who often enter treatment with a distinct cultural history and complex social experiences in a context of prolonged language deprivation in childhood. The bracketing of speech – conventionally taken within psychoanalysis as the presumed medium of communication and thought – in the clinic of the Deaf requires new questions and techniques in psychoanalytic treatment, and I maintain an active research agenda in this area.
My additional areas of clinical work involve the use of both psychiatric and psychoanalytic frames in the theorization and treatment of the psychoses, and, relatedly, the design and implementation of public care systems – especially those built on the accompaniment model via community care workers – both in the US and internationally.
I conduct sessions in person in Chicago as well as via video and phone connections. Although I am not presently accepting new patients for psychoanalytic work, I maintain a waiting list and can provide referrals as appropriate. Please contact me at s.ericreinhart@gmail.com with "Appointment Request" in the subject line to inquire about an appointment.