We all have stories. Many of our stories are deeply personal. Some of our stories are painful, traumatic, hilarious, heroic, bold, banal. Our stories connect usthey reflect who we are and how we relate to one another. Stories are extremely powerful and have the potential to bring us together, to shed light on the injustice committed against us and they lead us to understand that not one of us is alone in this world. But our stories are also a commodity-they help others sell their products, their programs, their services-and sometimes they mine our stories for the details that serve their interests best-and in doing so present us as less than whole. -Becky McFarlane, Recovering Our Stories event,

Beginning with discussion of what constitutes survivor research inCanada, this paper presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of published accounts of survivor-led research over the last twenty-five years. Though they are varied, these texts demonstrate a rhetorical shift from a focus on the individual mind/body out to the social world experienced by psychiatric consumer/survivors. Findings indicate that survivor-led research engages with recovery discourse in numerous, sometimes problematic ways, in order to push back against dominant biomedical and psychiatric discourses. Further, new language is being generated for understanding madness and distress, rooted in a survivor perspective.

Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis. Consequently, ideas rooted in a mental health/illness binary abound in higher learning, both as curriculum content and through institutional procedures that reinforce structures of normalcy. While madness then, is included in university spaces, this inclusion proceeds in ways that continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people. This paper offers Mad Studies as an alternative entry point for engaging with madness in higher education, arguing centring madness in pedagogical praxis has the potential to interrupt hegemonic ways of knowing, being, and learning. We illustrate how this disruption is facilitated by examining particular aspects of pedagogical praxis mobilized in Mad Studies, including building curriculum alongside mad community, centring madness in course design and student assessment, and the deployment of mad positivity. Ultimately, this approach provides a metacurriculum of unlearning, challenging students to consider how their engagement with madness in the classroom, and beyond, has the potential to disrupt sanist systems of oppression and the normalcy they reconstitute. Mental health/illness discourse currently runs rampant in higher education. Universities are declaring a 'mental health crisis' on campus (Hawkes, 2019; Reid, 2013) and policy, access, and accommodation strategies rest on tactics that respond with notions of risk and liability. At the same time, critical scholars continue to build on a long line of inquiry refuting the mental health/illness binary, and the responses it develops and valourizes (Fernando, 2017; Foucault, 2006; Mills, 2014; Parker, 2014). Yet scholarship resistant to biomedical epistemes is rarely engaged in undergraduate curriculum, and university administrations remain reticent to engage disability justice approaches to distress. Indeed, through this cumulative collective disengagement, students easily pass through programs of study without encountering alternative ways of knowing. Enter Mad Studies.

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In Ontario, hours of work and overtime standards are regulated by the Employment Standards Act (ESA). This legislation covers most employers and employees in the province. As part of an ESA reforms process designed to promote workplace flexibility and enhance competitiveness, the Ontario ESA (2000) allowed for the extension of weekly maximum hours from 48 to 60, and the calculation of overtime pay entitlements to be based on an averaging of hours of work over up to a four-week period. Situated in the context of shifts towards greater working time flexibility, this paper examines the dynamics of working time regulation in the Ontario ESA, with a specific focus on the regulation of excess and overtime hours. The paper considers these processes in relation to general trends towards forms of labour market regulation that support employer-oriented flexibility and that download the regulation of employment standards to privatized negotiations between individual employees and their employers, tendencies present in the ESA that were sustained through further reforms introduced in 2018 and 2019. The paper draws its analysis from interviews with both workers in precarious jobs and Employment Standards Officers from the Ontario Ministry of Labour (MOL), as well as administrative data from the MOL and archival records. In the general context of the rise of precarious employment, the paper argues that ESA hours of work and overtime provisions premised upon creating working time flexibility enhance employer control over time, exacerbate time pressures and uncertainty experienced by workers in precarious jobs, and thereby intensify conditions of precariousness. The article situates the working time provisions of Ontario’s ESA in the context of an ongoing fragmentation of the regulation of working time as legislated standards are eroded in ways that make workers in precarious jobs more vulnerable to employer exploitation.