2025 RCSL Meeting in Rabat – Sessions W and X

Session W: Judicialization of Social Problems and Governance of Security in the Anthropocene

Session X: Compassionate Care for ‘Monsters’? Justice, Psychiatry, and Anthropocene

Paper Presentation Session co-sponsored by RCSL WG Judicialization of Social Problems,
part of the RCSL Sessions at the V ISA Forum 2025, Knowing Justice in the Anthropocene, Rabat, Morocco, 6-11 July 2025.
Friday 11 July 2025, 15.00-16.45
Session Organizers: Emmanuelle BERNHEIM, University of Ottawa, Research Chair in Mental Health and Access to Justice, Canada,
Agnieszka DOLL, University of British Columbia, Irving K Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Canada,
and Joao VELLOSO, University of Ottawa, Canada
See Session Abstract and Paper Abstract Submission Form (V ISA Forum Website)

Provisional version; the final official version will be published by ISA after registration of the presenters, which has to take place before 22 March 2025.

Sessions Abstract:

Session W: The judicialization of social problems and the governance of security has changed substantially in the 21st Century, both by harshening criminal punishment and by widening the scope of penalization processes. Traditionally, democratic societies tend to manage problematic conflicts and “dangerous” populations through legal institutions anchored in the following liberal triad: legal rules, balanced rights, and sanctions mostly associated to criminal law. Beyond criminalization,many scholars are pointing to a variety of forms of judicialization, relying on criminal or administrative, civil, regulatory and even hybrid legal regimes.

This panel is organized by RCSL WG “Judicialization of Social Problems”. It puts into conversation papers about different contexts, hoping to illuminate how law and legal regimes are mobilized to govern security and social problems.

Session X: Because of the risk of violence and incapacity for decision-making and self-care, psychiatric diagnoses allow to hospitalize and treat people against their will, subsequently isolating them from the ‘normal’ rest. Considered to have therapeutic virtues, psychiatric coercion is on the rise in most countries of the global North. Seen like dangerous monsters, subjects of psychiatric coercion have steadily been granted legal rights to improve their legal position. These legal developments, however, have been oriented towards putting boundaries on psychiatric coercion, not eradicating it.

In this panel, we aim to question how, reframed as “compassionate,” the therapeutic dimension of psychiatric coercion justifies ignoring the safeguards supposed to protect rights, but also denying oppression at the interface of race, socioeconomic status or gender.

Chair: Joao Velloso, University of Ottawa, Canada

Session W: Judicialization of Social Problems and Governance of Security in the Anthropocene

(id=159914) “I Am No Longer Free to Raise My Child the Way I Want”. the Experiences of Ethnic, Religious, or Cultural Minority Families with the Dutch Child Welfare System.
I. Sportel

(id=163789) (De)Judicializing Gender Violence? Hybrid Regulation in Juvenile Victim-Offender Mediation.
G. Bugnon

(id=165935) The Mobilization of Legal Discourse in the Approval of Laws Restricting Circulation in Public Streets in Brazil.
A. Marques


Session X: Compassionate Care for ‘Monsters’? Justice, Psychiatry, and Anthropocene

(id=160237) “Here, We Do Not Render Justice, We Render Service:” Meta-Ethnography of Practices of Involuntary Psychiatric Admission across Jurisdictions.
A. Doll and E. Bernheim

(id=162413) Objectified, Infantilised, Bestial: The Institutionalisation of Muslim Psychiatric Patients in 20th Century Colonial Algeria.
N. Studer

(id=164229) Mittersteig: Microhistory of Austria’s First Forensic Psychiatric Prison.
M. Duller and M. Reiner


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This page last updated 7 January 2025