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Migration, Ethnicity, and Insanity
Main Entrance and Grounds of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum (left) and part of the female wing, about 1900. Image reproduced with permission Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga, Dunedin Regional Office, DAHI/D266/20271/520e).
These pages provide information about a three-year (2009-2012) Royal Society of New Zealand funded Marsden grant on migration, ethnicity, and insanity, 1860-1910, awarded to Professor Angela McCarthy (University of Otago) and Associate Professor Catharine Coleborne (University of Waikato)
Overall Project Description
Committal to a mental hospital was but one possible outcome of dysfunction, despair, and social and economic hardship experienced by foreign-born migrants in nineteenth-century Australasia. Yet comparative analysis addressing issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity has yet to be attempted in the Australasian sphere. This three-year project is comprised of four individual studies which focus on asylums for the insane in Dunedin, Auckland, and Melbourne between 1860 and 1910. A range of sources, including institutional patient casebooks, are utilised in conjunction with qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. The findings, situated within comparative, longitudinal, and transnational perspectives, will be disseminated in monographs, theses, journal articles, chapters, an edited collection, and public presentations. Beyond enhancing the history of medicine, migration, and ethnicity in Australasia, the study will have international significance, contributing to the history of migration and ethnicity, and British, Irish, and European social history. Moreover, historians can contribute to current understandings of how migrants are affected by social change through migration by considering key factors of social isolation such as language and cultural misunderstandings; addressing issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity in the past therefore has contemporary relevance and social value in the present.
Acknowledgements
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand
Archives New Zealand Dunedin Regional Office - see their on-line Seacliff website.
Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund
State Library of Victoria
Introduction