Technopsyence and Afro-Surrealism's Cripistemologies

Abstract

This article critiques today’s digital mental health research and treatment paradigms through a crip theoretical approach. I argue that, implemented in a neoliberal risk culture and austerity logics that implement big data to capacitate and debilitate, psychiatric technoscientific endeavors (what I call “technopsyience”) reproduce racial capitalism in their aim of governing mentalities.Yet mobile devices are also the means by which crip bodyminds creatively interrogate and resist racial capitalism and the psy discourses that support it. I explore a recent work of Afro-Surrealism that presents scenes of extractive racial capitalism, fantasies of digital futures, mental distress, and care, and that, I argue, opens up avenues for thinking bodyminds and the digital otherwise.