UC Riverside

Working at the intersection of Buddhist Studies, Ethnic Studies, and the Medical and Health Humanities, my doctoral research explores the production of the secular mind of mental health in the context of contemplative therapeutic movements in the era of COVID-19 (2020-2022). I engage in multiple ethnographic field sites, including entirely digital community spaces where Dharma organizations teach meditation and mindfulness techniques in a self-described “modern” rubric of public mental health care. Despite the many differences explored in this dissertation, contemplation is made to fit with a body of standardized and biomedical expectations regarding preventative and long-term wellness, addiction therapy, and palliative care. Treating these as productions—and not expressions—of the secular mind (and self), this dissertation centers a little-studied topic in scholarship about Buddhist modernism and medical humanist perspectives on free-market meditation: the mind (an addicted mind, the mind of the dying, a healthy mind, a “woke” mind, a racist and misogynist mind, an enlightened mind, a progressive mind) as a contest arena wherein multiple secularist discourses and practices about self-and community-making are currently taking place. Based on extensive, COVID-era ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines the Dharmic, biomedical, psychological, and social territories of the mind as a generative condition for what I term the “therapeutic secular.” The Buddhist therapeutic secular mind is a biopsychosocial phenomenon that unfolds in both public and private spheres. Ultimately, I argue that it engenders an anti-neoliberal moral narrative of mental health that (re)politicizes mind (and body) by authenticating experiences of discrimination and structural inequity in a context of mental health care, thereby empowering its members to engage in the public sphere in spite of bigoted harassment.