Archives of Care: Histories of Mental Health & Immigration Control in Scotland

This project investigates the imbrication of immigration controls and mental health care, through an empirical study on Scotland's asylum and immigration system. It historicizes this system within legacies of colonial and racialised mental health assessment, looking at how key NGOs, volunteer health care workers, and informal care networks interpret this history. The project uses a novel combination of ethnographic and archival methodologies to collaboratively generate ‘alternative archives’ that speak to this history, whilst exploring the practices, beliefs and motivations of people involved in providing contemporary mental health assessment and care. Here, divergent understandings of ‘care’ can overlap and come into friction, whilst different institutional and personal histories are drawn upon in evidencing and treating mental health conditions. The study takes its point of departure in Glasgow, a significant location due to its history as Scotland’s only asylum dispersal city, a ‘second city’ of the British Empire, and a key site for mental health intervention with migrant populations. Through detailed analysis of this case study and the cultivation of a new set of interdisciplinary methodological tools, the project will generate important ethical, conceptual, and practical interventions in the study of mental health, care, and colonial history.