Towards a Feminist Standpoint in Refugee Mental Health Research
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Abstract
Historically, psychiatry has been criticized by feminist activists and scholars as a patriarchal and misogynist discipline. I argue that feminist approaches can contribute to refugee mental health research by questioning some of its epistemological assumptions, by centering the experiences of women and other marginalized groups, and by acknowledging the social, cultural and political dimensions in the production of scientific knowledge about refugees, potentially bridging the gap between academia and activism in ways that are relevant to the subjects involved.
This paper includes 1) an overview of some contributions that feminist scholarship has made to the fields of mental health and refugee research, 2) a critical reflection on the intersections between psychiatry and migration studies, highlighting how gender has been read as a binary category used primarily to compare differences between sexes, and 3) a discussion of possible future directions for broadening the scope of refugee mental health research.
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