Vive la Révolution

Through the presentation of qualitative data, this verse reflects the author’s sincere effort to reconcile the divide between “town and gown,” all the while exploring the experiences and subsequent perceptions of activists within Mad Pride. In so doing, it creatively illustrates the broad dynamics and challenges that face those on the receiving end of the psychiatric system today

Project Re•center dot Vision: disability at the edges of representation

The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a ‘single story’ that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re•Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world

ID Politics: The Violence of Modernity

Scholarship in feminism, anticolonialism, Disability and Mad studies, have repositioned storytelling as instructive to the present and to the ethics of care. Emplotted with time and space, like the acts and lives of others, stories make discernible those everyday encounters, sites of practices, and material conditions that usher power and pain. They destabilize essentialism, so, too, the asymmetries that ensue, and are therefore pivotal in the politics toward self-definition. It has even been argued that the concept of the story garners much of the attention once assigned to that of identity. But here, I juxtapose, I entwine, no, I exbody competing multivalent social scripts, each a verse in itself, to nuance—albeit creatively—the story in this current age of governmentality and concomitant surveillance technologies. Paying homage to Patricia Hill Collins, I evoke intersectionality and endeavour to bring us back to identity politics … analytically

“Mad” Activism and its (Ghanaian?) Future: A Prolegomena to Debate

This paper explores how scholars continuing within, or expanding on, Goffmanian tradition have, to varying degrees, given grit to the praxis and study of (new?) social movements today. Particular emphasis is put on the politics of madness, including the writings of anti-psychiatrists, as well as the recent emergence of Mad Pride, and how these might relate to human rights advocacy projects in Ghana. The discussion draws on semi-structured and qualitative interviews with “mad” activists, and is interspersed with personal anecdotes as an effort to map the author’s sinuous – yet continuous – path to an “engaged sociology.

On Becoming "White" Through Ethnographic Fieldwork in Ghana: Are ideas imperial by course?

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, and the growing number of studies on “sanism” (or psychiatric oppression), this paper revisits outstanding methodological concerns around privilege and power, body and space, language and the liminality of social categories, as a platform to reconsider the insider/outsider debate. It ponders openly, and hopefully collectively, the implications of expanding research interests, so, too, the very circulation of ideas, against what the author is analytically describing as the experience of becoming “White.” The article focuses on questions that fieldwork exposed about researcher identity and “belonging,” not least the risk of essentialism. In effect, it seeks to demonstrate the ethical and epistemological dilemmas that arise from giving account, toward a more sensitive way in academia, relationship building, and solidarity work—where, when, how, or whether, critical ethnography can relinquish, reimagine, or altogether transform its dialectical tensions without undermining ends of resistance