People
CICSI is a network of academics, independent scholars, and practitioners in various disciplines. As our work progresses, we will invite and affiliate members with expertise in a range of social concerns.
CICSI Founding Director
Prof Fabian Freyenhagen
Leading expert on the early Frankfurt School. Member of the Essex Human Rights Centre. Working in areas of Social and Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Psychiatry, focusing on mental distress and its social conditions, and autonomy in care contexts. Author of Adorno's Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly.
Co-Director
Prof Vladimir Safatle
Professor of Philosophy & Psychology at the University of São Paulo. Examines the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis in contemporary French thought and the Frankfurt School. Responsible for the translation of Theodor W. Adorno's complete works into Portuguese and writes a column in El País.
CICSI Co-Founder, Research Associate
Dr Polona Curk
Interested in affective influences in relationships from a psychosocial psychoanalytic perspective, Polona has published on autonomy, destructiveness, affective equality, the concept of narcissism, and the notion of insight in mental health. Co-edited two books, The Sublime in Everyday Life, and Narcissism: A Critical Reader
Research Associate
Dr Timo Beeker
Practicing psychiatrist and academic researcher from Brandenburg Medical School, Germany. Works with the Open Dialogue approach. Interested in processes of medicalisation, how they are promoted and how they are experienced or resisted.
Research Associate
Felix Yeung
Felix's research explores how neoliberalism is related to individual suffering and how collective mourning and holding practices might respond. He asks how psychoanalytic theories might be used to "psychoanalyse" democracies.
Research Associate
Dr Sanne te Meerman
Assistant professor at University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Interested in academic discourse on mental illness definitions such as ADHD and ASS. Special focus on reification and looping effects. Editor and co-author of Guidelines on ADHD psycho-educational literature.
Advisory Board
Activist and Trainer
Hearing Voices Network
Expert-by-experience; author; activist; speaker and trainer; and former National chair of the Hearing Voices Network in England. Honorary Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the UEL. Editor of several books, including Demedicalising Misery and Models of Madness.
Klinikum Bremen-Ost, Germany
& Subcommittee on Torture
Sociologist and anthropologist, expert on welfare and civic law as well as participatory action research. Scientific lead of a program of citizen research on the exercise of the human rights of people made vulnerable by old age, illness, disability.
Former UN Special Rapporteur on Health (2014 - 2020), focusing on mental health; Professor of child psychiatry and public mental health; human rights advocate, director of Human Rights Monitoring Institute, an NGO based in Lithuania.