Abigail Mack

My research traces the political, ethical, and experiential processes that animate the contemporary carceral systems of mental healthcare practice  in the US.  My dissertation research traces the procedures of involuntary psychiatric commitment from initial emergency evaluation to courtroom hearings where patients may contest their holds in order to understand the intersections of the public healthcare and criminal justice systems here in Los Angeles.  Drawing on 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork across these institutional spaces, the dissertation documents how consequential narratives about patients steadily build over time, mediated by bureaucratic formwork, institutional affects and popular political sentiments about the scope and limitations of  public mental healthcare and the criminal justice system.  

In addition to documenting the outcomes and consequences of the current intersections of public mental health and criminal justice in the US, my work highlights moments and spaces of care that  unsettle the political status quo and provide alternative forms of caring for and responding to people in mental health crises.