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Journal Articles by Efrat Gold

The concept of mobile immobility serves as an invitation to further trouble disability studies di... more The concept of mobile immobility serves as an invitation to further trouble disability studies discourses on mobility and immobility. In this article, we theorize what im/mobility means in contexts of political incarceration and violent oppression in the Middle East, as numerous bodies are caught and injured by ableist barriers, borders, carceral institutions, walls and wars. Troubling ableist hierarchies that assume the superiority of mobility, we highlight the many ways that immobility is leveraged towards political mobilization, casting away any clear definitional boundary between
the concepts of mobility and immobility. Through a disability studies lens, we unpack mobile immobility by exploring three examples that demonstrate the complexity and nuance needed to theorize im/mobility. First, we enter through the case of a Kurdish political prisoner in 1980s Turkey who became disabled as a result of participating in a hunger strike and two death fasts during his incarceration. We then explore the genre of incarceration ecriture, detailing written and artistic creations produced by political prisoners and survivors in the Middle East, and drawing attention to how inmates mobilize their experiences of immobility towards transformative justice. Finally, we consider the category of kulbars, or illegal cross-border carriers that are at once both forced into mobility and immobility due to extreme poverty and lack of political and social recognition. Through each of these examples, we question what mobility and political mobilization mean in the contexts of state violence, surveillance, authoritarianism, austerity, and borders.

Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 2022

Using various methods and strategies of Critical Discourse Analysis, this article demonstrates ho... more Using various methods and strategies of Critical Discourse Analysis, this article demonstrates how certain influential nursing texts generate a certain biomedical framing of the mental health nursing assessment. Accordingly, the mental health assessment in undergraduate nursing education becomes imbricated in processes of governance that legitimate psychiatric discourse by 1. Presenting the opinions and judgements of mental health professionals as objective scientific facts; 2. Utilizing grammatical mood and modality to convey a matter-of-fact urgency and necessity for psychiatric intervention that is made to appear largely through conjecture and passive logical leaps; and 3. Through hybrid fusion with other scientific and medical disciplines that lend credibility to psychiatry through association. While we largely focus on critique of the mental health assessment, we buttress this critique using two other institutional texts that draw on a psychiatric framing of mental health, to demonstrate how these texts reinforce and work in discursive cohesion with the mental health assessment. We conclude by discussing the implications of these consequences to nursing education and nursing students and educators alike.

Book Chapters by Efrat Gold

DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies, 2022

There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which... more There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious.… It is useless to speak of … people who are healthy and people who are not healthy. Apart from the fact that there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that the human being is necessarily cheerful by nature.-Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic sense of life (translation) 1 Do I believe people have anxiety? Do I believe that people have compulsions? Of course. But I believe these feelings are a normal, human way of experiencing reality.-Bonnie Burstow (quoted in Nick Arnold, "'Mental health is a myth' says anti psychiatrist Bonnie Burstow")

Many are familiar with the torturous experiments of McGill University psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Camer... more Many are familiar with the torturous experiments of McGill University psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. Less known are the torturous experiments of University of Manitoba psychologist John Zubek, also linked to the military. In this highly revealing historical inquiry, drawing on archival material, this chapter traces Zubek’s immobilization research, its funders, and their respective mandates—one of which was the enormously powerful American governmental body, the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH). Gold demonstrates the fit with dominant understandings of torture. Correspondingly, she asks, “If not torture, what was NIMH’s interest in Zubek’s research?”

Books by Efrat Gold

Canadian Scholars, 2022

DisAppearing offers a relational orientation to disability studies. From encounters with disabili... more DisAppearing offers a relational orientation to disability studies. From encounters with disability and disabled people in educational settings from elementary school to university, in novels and other texts, in hospitals and policing, in dance, on the street, and in community centres, as well as in considerations of injury and healing, and life and death, the chapters in this collection explore a variety of cultural scenes of disability. By doing so, this collection reveals what disability can mean through scenes of its dis/ appearance and demonstrates how to remake these meanings in more life-affirming ways.

Encouraging critical engagement with how disability is noticed and lived, the many chapters, as well as poetry, narrative, and a podcast transcript, reveal the meaning of disability appearing and disappearing in everyday life and beyond. Bringing together the work of scholars, artists, and activists, many of whom identify as disabled, DisAppearing encourages students to approach disability differently and to reimagine its appearance in the world.

Engaging, political, artistic, and philosophical, this text, with an emphasis on the Canadian context, is an invaluable resource for disability studies students and instructors.

Dissertation by Efrat Gold

This dissertation explores constructions of psychiatry as accurate, effective, and necessary by t... more This dissertation explores constructions of psychiatry as accurate, effective, and necessary by tracing supposedly objective psychiatric facts to their subjective roots. I focus on post-WWII Montreal, where the discursive shift from "mental hygiene" into "mental health" signified a new era of psychiatric alignment with science and medicine in order to question the ostensible and self-proclaimed certainty of psychiatric philosophy and practice. I explore the purposeful association of psychiatry with medicine, foregrounding the ways that a totalizing ideology (Arendt, 1951) was used to buttress psychiatric expansion while simultaneously abstracting individuals into groups and types of mental health problems. By constructing the subjective opinions of professionals as objective reality, the facticity of psychiatry is rooted in eugenics hierarchies that are mobilized towards creating a particular version of desirable citizens. Using archival data from the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (Canada) and related organizations, I read expert-centered accounts against the grain, tracing ideologies, logical leaps, constructions of facticity, and overarchingly, tracing objective facts to their subjective situatedness. Focusing on the ways that undescribed and abstracted behaviours were used to funnel many individuals into a few problem-types, I show how constructions of contemporary mental health ideology are bound to social context. Specifically, I point to a psychiatric totalitarianism

Book Reviews by Efrat Gold

Theatre Research in Canada, 2023

Creative and Community by Efrat Gold

constructing psychiatric certainty, 2021

Papers by Efrat Gold