WGS Post-doctoral Diversity Fellow 2023-2025

Lou Tam is the inaugural Postdoctoral Diversity Fellow in the MIT Women’s and Gender Studies Program. They received their Ph.D. with distinction in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University in 2023. Dr Tam is a critical theorist who focuses on the racial and settler colonial politics of mental health in state-funded and institutional settings. Their interdisciplinary research bridges feminist, queer, critical race, and disability theory and interpretive methods.  

Dr. Tam’s latest research broadly questions how “frontline work” and support (peer support, mutual aid, advocacy, service provision) are conceptualized and practiced in the North American left. Their first monograph documents progressive psychiatrists’ and social workers’ struggles to enact social justice in Canadian mental health and social services. Set against the backdrop of government initiatives to hire and fund programs for migrants and people of color, Palliative States proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding the social organization of the racial capitalist welfare state. Tam weaves together strands of Marxist feminist, Black radical, and decolonial thought to culturally critique the role of emotion in ideology and its significance in shaping leftist helping subjectivities and their relationships to the state. Palliative States is a reflection on diasporic consciousness and cross-class solidarity in the helping professions.

Tam has published journal articles and book chapters in the fields of Ethnic Studies, Disability Studies, and American Studies on clinical discourses of Asian American nervousness, cross-racial solidarity in psychiatric consumer/survivor/ex-patient’s movements, and psychiatry behind bars.

Research interests: the medicalization of race and poverty; the history of cross-cultural and structural psychiatry; anti-oppressive mental health practice; the intersections of immigration, criminal, and mental health law; prison psychiatry; social and carceral reforms; disability justice and abolition