Claudia Lang
Biographic Data
| ID | 3640711 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Claudia Lang |
| GIVEN NAMES | Claudia |
| FAMILY NAME | Lang |
| SIGNATURE | LANG C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leipzig University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9940-4245 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Planetary health
The concept of ‘planetary health’ asks how human health and disease relate to the environment and to other species on a planetary scale. Cutting across scales, it allows us to think of human health and healthcare beyond the individual and beyond specific populations, asking how they relate to more-than-human others and to the planet at large. This broad approach to health responds to multiple crises of the Anthropocene, including climate change, …
Ecomelancholia in the city
People increasingly inhabit toxic and damaged urban environments that change not only their bodies but also their affective relations with the city. This paper focuses on 'urban ecomelancholia,' an affective response to experienced or anticipated environmental damage and loss, and the corresponding attachment to memories of past urban environments. As grieving with transformative potential, melancholia provides a lens to late industrialism's ambi…
Reconfiguring Psy Expertise in the Digital Age
Mental health platforms and apps provide technologies and techniques for self-work, diagnosis, and management of everyday crises. Therapeutic interventions designed to work outside the clinic, they distribute and reconfigure psy expertise. Using the cases of a chatbot-based mental health app and a digital mental health platform, both developed in Bengaluru, India, this article ethnographically attends to new forms of expertise that emerge within …
Digital technologies and the future of health
As projects seeking to provide digitized tools in health care and medicine are gaining ground at an accelerating pace, imaginations and incipient formations of digital health have acquired a new political urgency. These projects promise to revolutionize health care and medicine. However, efforts to institutionalize digital technologies in health are often fraught with difficulties that cause them to stall during implementation. We explore digital…
Dreaming big with little therapy devices
This paper examines the aspirations, imaginaries and utopias of designers of an AI-based mental health app in India. By looking at automated therapy as both technological fix and sociotechnical object, I ask, What can we learn from engaging with psy technologists' imaginaries and practices of health care futures? What are the assumptions they encode in the app? How does automated therapy reconfigure the geographies and temporalities of care? Whil…
Global Health for All
Health of Others
The Feasibility of a Parent Group Treatment for Youth with Anxiety Disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Neurochemistry and subjunctivities of depression in Kerala, South India
The narrative of depression as a neurochemical imbalance in the brain or, more precisely, a deficiency of the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine - largely produced by commercial interests of the international and national pharmaceutical industry and spread globally by international diagnostic systems - has found its way into the offices of mainstream psychiatrists in Kerala. In the clinical encounters, social, economic and existential…
Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health
Depression in Kerala
This book examines depression as a widely diagnosed and treated common mental disorder in India and offers a significant ethnographic study of the application of a traditional Indian medical system (Ayurveda) to the very modern problem of depression. Based on over a year of fieldwork, it investigates the Ayurvedic response to the burden of depression in the Indian state of Kerala as one of the key processes of the local appropriation or glocaliza…
Soziale Ästhetik, Atmosphäre, Medialität
Translation and purification
In this paper, the author traces two parallel movements of institutionalized Ayurvedic psychiatry, an emergent field of specialization in Kerala, India: the 'work of purification' and the 'work of translation' that Latour has described as characteristic of the 'modern constitution.' The author delineates these processes in terms of the relationship of Ayurvedic psychiatry to (1) allopathic psychiatry, (2) bhutavidya, a branch of textual Ayurveda …
Trick or treat? MuslimThangals, psychologisation and pragmatic realism in Northern Kerala, India
Thangals are an endogamous community in Kerala, India, of Yemeni heritage who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad's family. Due to their sacrosanct status, many thangals work as religious healers and thus are part of the informal mental health care system in Northern Kerala. Using the case of one thangal healer as an illustration of the many ritual healers in Kerala who engage the modern discourse of psychology in their practices, I ar…
Appropriating Depression
The appropriation of biopsychiatric concepts such as depression, and their reframing in clinical and academic discussions, are important parts of the revitalization of bhūt vidyā as Ayurvedic psychiatry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kerala from 2009 to 2011, in this article we explore the process and the controversies of translating and correlating the biopsychiatric notion of depression, as a discrete and biologic pathological …
Transforming the Self and Healing the Body Through the Use of Testimonies in a Divine Retreat Center, Kerala
Depressed” mothers' perceptions of their preschool children's vulnerability
Appropriating Depression
The appropriation of biopsychiatric concepts such as depression, and their reframing in clinical and academic discussions, are important parts of the revitalization of bhūt vidyā as Ayurvedic psychiatry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kerala from 2009 to 2011, in this article we explore the process and the controversies of translating and correlating the biopsychiatric notion of depression, as a discrete and biologic pathological …
Translation and purification
In this paper, the author traces two parallel movements of institutionalized Ayurvedic psychiatry, an emergent field of specialization in Kerala, India: the 'work of purification' and the 'work of translation' that Latour has described as characteristic of the 'modern constitution.' The author delineates these processes in terms of the relationship of Ayurvedic psychiatry to (1) allopathic psychiatry, (2) bhutavidya, a branch of textual Ayurveda …
Trick or treat? MuslimThangals, psychologisation and pragmatic realism in Northern Kerala, India
Thangals are an endogamous community in Kerala, India, of Yemeni heritage who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad's family. Due to their sacrosanct status, many thangals work as religious healers and thus are part of the informal mental health care system in Northern Kerala. Using the case of one thangal healer as an illustration of the many ritual healers in Kerala who engage the modern discourse of psychology in their practices, I ar…
Transforming the Self and Healing the Body Through the Use of Testimonies in a Divine Retreat Center, Kerala
Depressed” mothers' perceptions of their preschool children's vulnerability
Transforming the Self and Healing the Body Through the Use of Testimonies in a Divine Retreat Center, Kerala
Appropriating Depression
The appropriation of biopsychiatric concepts such as depression, and their reframing in clinical and academic discussions, are important parts of the revitalization of bhūt vidyā as Ayurvedic psychiatry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kerala from 2009 to 2011, in this article we explore the process and the controversies of translating and correlating the biopsychiatric notion of depression, as a discrete and biologic pathological …
Trick or treat? MuslimThangals, psychologisation and pragmatic realism in Northern Kerala, India
Thangals are an endogamous community in Kerala, India, of Yemeni heritage who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad's family. Due to their sacrosanct status, many thangals work as religious healers and thus are part of the informal mental health care system in Northern Kerala. Using the case of one thangal healer as an illustration of the many ritual healers in Kerala who engage the modern discourse of psychology in their practices, I ar…
Depression in Kerala
This book examines depression as a widely diagnosed and treated common mental disorder in India and offers a significant ethnographic study of the application of a traditional Indian medical system (Ayurveda) to the very modern problem of depression. Based on over a year of fieldwork, it investigates the Ayurvedic response to the burden of depression in the Indian state of Kerala as one of the key processes of the local appropriation or glocaliza…
Soziale Ästhetik, Atmosphäre, Medialität
Translation and purification
In this paper, the author traces two parallel movements of institutionalized Ayurvedic psychiatry, an emergent field of specialization in Kerala, India: the 'work of purification' and the 'work of translation' that Latour has described as characteristic of the 'modern constitution.' The author delineates these processes in terms of the relationship of Ayurvedic psychiatry to (1) allopathic psychiatry, (2) bhutavidya, a branch of textual Ayurveda …
Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health
The Feasibility of a Parent Group Treatment for Youth with Anxiety Disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Neurochemistry and subjunctivities of depression in Kerala, South India
The narrative of depression as a neurochemical imbalance in the brain or, more precisely, a deficiency of the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine - largely produced by commercial interests of the international and national pharmaceutical industry and spread globally by international diagnostic systems - has found its way into the offices of mainstream psychiatrists in Kerala. In the clinical encounters, social, economic and existential…
Global Health for All
Health of Others
Digital technologies and the future of health
As projects seeking to provide digitized tools in health care and medicine are gaining ground at an accelerating pace, imaginations and incipient formations of digital health have acquired a new political urgency. These projects promise to revolutionize health care and medicine. However, efforts to institutionalize digital technologies in health are often fraught with difficulties that cause them to stall during implementation. We explore digital…
Dreaming big with little therapy devices
This paper examines the aspirations, imaginaries and utopias of designers of an AI-based mental health app in India. By looking at automated therapy as both technological fix and sociotechnical object, I ask, What can we learn from engaging with psy technologists' imaginaries and practices of health care futures? What are the assumptions they encode in the app? How does automated therapy reconfigure the geographies and temporalities of care? Whil…
Reconfiguring Psy Expertise in the Digital Age
Mental health platforms and apps provide technologies and techniques for self-work, diagnosis, and management of everyday crises. Therapeutic interventions designed to work outside the clinic, they distribute and reconfigure psy expertise. Using the cases of a chatbot-based mental health app and a digital mental health platform, both developed in Bengaluru, India, this article ethnographically attends to new forms of expertise that emerge within …
Planetary health
The concept of ‘planetary health’ asks how human health and disease relate to the environment and to other species on a planetary scale. Cutting across scales, it allows us to think of human health and healthcare beyond the individual and beyond specific populations, asking how they relate to more-than-human others and to the planet at large. This broad approach to health responds to multiple crises of the Anthropocene, including climate change, …
Ecomelancholia in the city
People increasingly inhabit toxic and damaged urban environments that change not only their bodies but also their affective relations with the city. This paper focuses on 'urban ecomelancholia,' an affective response to experienced or anticipated environmental damage and loss, and the corresponding attachment to memories of past urban environments. As grieving with transformative potential, melancholia provides a lens to late industrialism's ambi…
Psychology (9 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Psychiatry (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (3 works) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (2 works) · Computer Science (2 works)