The Carceral Geographies of the Sanist University


Fady Shanouda, Carleton University

This presentation brings together Mad Studies and Critical Suicide Studies to examine university responses to student suicidality, including involuntary leave policies, defensive architecture, use of chemical and physical restraints during hospital transfers, and postvention protocols that all work to reify madness and suicidality as internalized, pathologized, and ultimately criminal states of being (Marsh, 2010). These responses are embedded within a broader psy-regime in Canadian universities that decenters madness and diminishes mad people’s expertise, depoliticizes and ahistorizes suicidality (White et al., 2015), and shifts the responsibility for care onto the individual (Aubrecht, 2019). These university-endorsed responses to suicidality, of which there are four to examine in this presentation, are relatively new and work to reshape higher education in ways that resemble carceral geographies (Moran, 2015; Ben Moshe, 2020). Mandated or involuntary leave of absence protocols (an extension of prevention measures at most universities) all but expel students from the university, including student housing, until they can prove improved mental health often through medical and psychiatric assessment (Green et al., 2022). All the while, the student is in distress, has lost the limited support universities offer and is without legal representation. Other prevention measures include defensive architecture or defensive designs (Currie 2023) in the form of increased surveillance (cameras, motion detection, remote monitoring, and alarms and lighting) and suicide barriers (capture nets, temporary gates, blockade fencing, and permanent iron barriers) frequently installed following the death of a student in specific on-campus sites forming new restrictive campus spaces. Students in distress might be subjected to chemical (drugs) or physical (handcuffs or zip ties) restraints in cases where they either voluntarily or involuntarily agree to be transferred to the hospital (Neilson et al., 2019; Chittle et al., 2022). Unsurprisingly, hospital transfers of this nature traumatize students, hindering future support-seeking and rendering the university a carceral space for mad people. Institutions have also responded to the rise of student suicides by developing comprehensive postvention protocols that describe, in some detail, the expected actions and measures every university department - from parking services to the president’s office - should take following an on-campus student suicide. Unsurprisingly, investigating the university’s role in the suicide is not part of these protocols. Together, these new carceral measures are justified through ideologies of risk and safety that, through the application of psy-knowledges, construct the mad body as out of bounds. These efforts shape the affective experiences of students’ madness, distress, and suicidality. They reinforce the notion of the mad and suicidal subject as pathological and criminal, leaving little room to consider the historical and socio-cultural conditions shaping students’ everyday learning experiences.

This paper will be presented at the following session: