Professor Clara Han
Professor of Anthropology |
John Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
“From me it is born”: Psychic life and a politics of the ordinary
Professor Clara Han presents the CAMHRA Annual Lecture 2026: “From me it is born”: Psychic life and a politics of the ordinary. In this lecture, she traces the tensions between cruelty and care in a world marked by violence, developing questions that unsettle disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and mental health research.
The CAMHRA Annual Lecture is a landmark event in the Centre’s calendar, bringing together scholars, practitioners, partners and community members to reflect critically on emerging questions in mental health. Each year, the lecture offers a space for dialogue across disciplines, opening new ways of thinking about how mental health is shaped, understood and transformed in everyday life.
Professor Clara Han is Professor of Anthropology at John Hopkins University and a CAMHRA Professorial Fellow. In this lecture, she is concerned with the mismatch of cruelty and care in a world at war.
Developing questions that, in her view, stand before any strict disciplinary boundaries between professional anthropology and mental health research, she asks: What must we attend to in order to see the possibility for care in contexts marked by a cruelty that has been exercised precisely to corrode the connection with oneself? What is the nature of care here?
She turns to the women whom she came to know in a neighbourhood marked by pervasive police violence, describing how their acknowledgment of the singularity of a life might serve as a guide for our own intellectual labour.
People
Find more CAMHRA on camera on our YouTube channel
Latest news
Read CAMHRA’s latest news
Ethnographic Time: Repetition, Doubling, Voicing
Professor Veena Das presents the Opening Address for the CAMHRA In Focus Event Series: “Ethnographic Time: Repetition, Doubling, Voicing. In this lecture, she attempts to provide a portrait of a family by aligning their accounts gathered over a long period through intermittent visits to them at different sites.
