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Paper short abstract

This presentation analyses the emergence of forensic psychiatry as a medico-legal field in Taiwan. Drawing on Social Worlds/Arenas theory and situational analysis, it shows how specialist certification shapes psychiatric expertise through struggles over legitimacy, authority, and jurisdiction.

Paper long abstract

What kinds of expertise are required to make “madness” legible to the law? In Taiwan, a series of high-profile criminal cases has intensified public attention to the relationship between mental illness, criminal responsibility, and psychiatric expertise in the courtroom. At the same time, forensic psychiatry has recently undergone institutional consolidation through the establishment of a specialist certification system by the Taiwan Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. This presentation takes the emergence of this qualification regime as an empirical entry point for examining the evolving relationship among psychiatry, law, and society.

Drawing on two years of qualitative research and informed by Social Worlds/Arenas theory and situational analysis, the presentation maps the heterogeneous actors, discourses, and institutional arrangements through which forensic psychiatry is being constituted as a subspecialty. In doing so, the paper examines how forensic psychiatry is assembled and institutionalised as an emerging medico-legal field through struggles over legitimacy, authority, and professional jurisdiction. Professionalisation is therefore approached not as a straightforward outcome of technical differentiation but as an ongoing socio-epistemic process in which expertise is negotiated across interacting social worlds, including courts, psychiatric practitioners, psychologists, professional associations, and wider publics.

Engaging Michel Foucault’s reflections on the governance of deviance, the presentation suggests that the certification system functions as a site where psychiatric knowledge, legal rationalities, and societal anxieties about unpredictable violence are aligned and contested. The Taiwanese case thus illuminates how emerging medico-legal fields take shape through institutional work, epistemic politics, and struggles over authority.