Lou Tam
PhD
Interests
Transnational disability studies or Southern disability studies; mad studies; critical prison studies or carceral studies; medical humanities; medicalization of race and poverty; history of social justice in the helping professions; intersections of immigration, criminalization, and mental health systems
About
Dr. Lou Tam grew up in Tkaronto (Treaty 13 Mississaugas of the Credit), a child of immigrants who arrived in the 80s. As a critical theorist, they draw on a range of qualitative methods to explore the how and why of migrant, prisoner, and disability justice movements. They are particularly interested in how settler capitalism delimits the horizon of radical politics and the narratives of power and possibility we tell ourselves.
At present, their first book project (solicited by Duke UP) utilizes ethnographic interviews with "caring leftists" in immigrant services to investigate the ways in which professional paradigms mediate their approaches to social change. They are also co-developing a special issue with La Marr Jurelle Bruce and Meghann O'Leary that queries the relationship between madness and resistance, centering anti-colonial and Global South perspectives. Their writing on discourses of Asian American nervousness, mental health user/survivor movements, and prison psychiatry can be found interdisciplinary journals such as American Quarterly and Disability and the Global South.
Prior to joining the University at Buffalo, Dr Tam was the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's and Gender Studies at MIT and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow. Outside their position in the academy, they have organized with mental health patients, immigration detainees, and prisoners for over a decade. To this end, Dr Tam's work follows the feminist of color tradition of thinking and writing from embodied experience and material conditions as an entry point into social investigation.
Education
- PhD, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University, 202
- MA, Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), 2012
- HBA, Women and Gender Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, 2010
Professional Affiliations
- Communities of Care Project (Mellon Foundation)
- York University Black, Transnational, and Indigenous Narratives of Disability (BTIND) Working Group
- MIT Data + Feminism Lab
- American Studies Association Critical Disability Studies Caucus