Dörte Bemme

Dörte Bemme is an assistant professor at the Department for Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the Department for Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University and held two postdocs in anthropology at UNC Chapel Hill and the New School, New York. She co-leads the social theory platform at the ESRC Centre for Society & Mental Health and is the managing editor of Transcultural Psychiatry. Dörte’s research is situated at the intersection of anthropology of knowledge and psychiatry. She has conducted long-term, multi-sited fieldwork among Global Mental Health experts in international institutions, globally networked consortia, and implementation sites in South Africa. Her work explores how mental health problems are construed, enacted, and experienced at different scales. Studying the production of global knowledge and care, focusses on how differently situated actors create, maintain, and reconcile orders of difference framed as pertaining to culture, power, intersectionality, epistemology, or location. Her recent methodological and theoretical interventions pursue “mutuality as a method” to make Global Mental Health more equitable (Bemme et.al 2023), and suggest to make social theory more inclusive of experiential knowledge and accountable to real world change (Bemme & Behague 2024).

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