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Dr Becka Hudson is a Visiting Research Fellow from 2 January to 30 June 2025.
Becka Hudson is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck’s School of Historical Studies, researching the use of cognitive behavioural therapies (CBT) in prison, as part of the CBT in Context project. She holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in criminology and psychiatric anthropology. Her research interests include imprisonment, British colonial psychiatry, the anthropology of trauma, processes of racialisation, and the political economy of punishment. She is a former Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck Criminology, and former Associate Editor of Law and Critique. Her work has appeared in History of the Human Sciences, Secrecy and Society, Verso Blog, Viewpoint Magazine, and more.
Project Description
Carceral Pathologies: Trauma, Ideology and Imprisonment is an archival project investigating how notions of psychic injury, trauma and distress were mobilised during British counterinsurgency campaigns in the Kenyan and Malayan ‘Emergencies’—movements against British colonial rule. Drawing on archives in London, Oxford, and Nairobi, the project traces how psychiatric and psychological thinking became involved with rationales for carceral expansion (via a vast network of detention camps), and for programmes to ‘rehabilitate’ insurgents away from anti-colonial feeling. In particular, the project focuses on how early conceptions of trauma and psychic injury were offered as the cause of a racialised madness that required colonial ‘rehabilitation’. Theoretically, the project situates rationales about trauma and rehabilitation within a materialist understanding of capitalism. Across archives, I look for how ideas about trauma have concretely circulated during crises of capital accumulation, and how they have become implicated in processes of intense and violent racialisation. Through the research, findings may inform debates about the ‘imperial boomerangs’, and better illuminate capitalism’s tendency to demarcate, confine and pathologise.
