Mad Archaeologies of Asylums and Sanist Necropolitics

“Lunatic” asylums and psychiatric institutions have been studied in historical archaeology and heritage for over two decades. However, these disciplines have not yet engaged with mad studies, the mad liberation movement or the concept of sanism. Epistemic imbalances may lead scholars to miss the past necropolitical and carceral aspects central to these institutions and to the continued systemic oppression of disabled, crip and mad people. This paper therefore charts a new direction for the study of asylums and psychiatric institutions: a survivor-centric one relying on the concept of necropolitics and on mad studies to interpret these spaces. Taking two former French asylums as case studies, this article reinterprets these spaces as sanist death-worlds and explores their materiality and afterlives. The last part of this article argues in favour of mad archaeologies, while remaining wary of the risk of neutralisation ever-present when bringing liberatory sets of actions and perspectives into academia.