Description:

Join the Buffett Institute for our faculty research lunchtime talk series on the first Friday of every month. Faculty members give a half-hour talk intended for a broad, multidisciplinary audience of Northwestern students, faculty and staff, followed by a conversational Q&A. Lunch is provided beginning at 12:15 p.m.

Despite the many changes that have marked the evolution of mental health work for more than a century, including the existence of teletherapy options, until very recently the default modality oftreatment was in person. It was only after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that remote modalities became widely adopted and legitimated. This has turned what was the norm before into one option within a broader spectrum of possibilities. Historical discontinuities of this kind make more visible to the analyst social and technological configurations that were less visible before as actors reexamine previously taken-for-granted processes and assumptions, and develop new procedures and rationales for them. This also helps better perceive connections that tie work to larger societal dynamics. 

On the first Friday this February, Pablo J. Boczkowski, Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor of Communication Studies at the School of Communication, will draw upon preliminary analyses from an ongoing ethnographic study of the digitization of mental health work in Argentina to argue thatfocusing on the historical discontinuity in modalities of treatment makes it possible to understand related discontinuities regarding inequality and culture that have been less salient in the relevant scholarship.