In and Out of the Asylum – Workshop

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On 2-3 February 2026, the project PI Chris Sandal-Wilson participated in an international workshop at the University of Trieste – ‘In and Out of the Asylum: Critiques and Reforms in Historical Perspective’.

The workshop, organised by Dr Francesco Toncich of the University of Trieste, represented an important opportunity to think through the history of psychiatric reform in a transnational perspective.

Over the course of the two-day workshop, the space of the borderlands emerged as a richly promising space from which to re-approach the history of psychiatry. The workshop’s focus on the Upper Adriatic – the area split today between Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia, where borders have shifted dramatically across the course of the twentieth century – offered an important point of comparison with the case of psychiatric mobilities in the post-Ottoman Levant, which was the subject of Chris’s presentation.

The workshop concluded with a visit to the former asylum at Parco San Giovanni, which Franco Basaglia transformed over the course of the 1970s from an institution with over one thousand in-patients to the hub of a community-based system. But the conversations which started in Trieste will undoubtedly continue.