John Marlovits

Assist. Professor
Ph.D. UC Santa Cruz, 2008

Expertise:
Medical anthropology and psychiatry, science and technology, popular culture and publics

Office Hours: 

Thursdays from 3:00 – 5:00pm in-person (Clark Hall 404J) or via Zoom

Clark Hall 404J
408-924-6541
john.marlovits@sjsu.edu

John Marlovits’ research addresses the relationship between psychiatry, affective geographies, and popular culture in California and Washington. His primary focus is in developing cultural and historical studies of the entanglement of psychiatric pathologies, gendered and labor-based subjectivity, and neoliberal abandonment as they emerge in place. In essence, his research asks: how do psychopathologies of everyday life tell us about basic cultural gaps, exclusions, and struggles to form livable and democratic public cultures in a particular place?  And how are dominant disorders diagnostic – not of individuals – but of collective cultural conflicts and transitions?

            Building on previous research about depression and the cultural geography of capitalist restructuring in Seattle, Professor Marlovits is working on a book manuscript that looks at the intersection of popular psychiatric and psychological ailments, on one hand; and an archive of place-based countercultural poetics and performances of derangement, psychosis, and extreme expressions of subjectivity in California skate-punk publics on the other. He uses this material to show how those affects, performances, and popular culture are a window onto transformations of postwar subjectivity and American Depression. And he tracks how contests over power, personhood, and control are negotiated and jostle between popular place-based practices, medical normalization, and the composition of laboring bodies and minds.