Unlearning through Mad Studies: Disruptive pedagogical praxis

Abstract

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.

Introduction to Canada Watch: Critical perspectives on mental health/mad studies

“…The rich history of the psychiatric survivor movement in Canada is one exemplar-psychiatric survivors have told their stories of trauma and abuse within Canadian mental health institutions and at the hands of the psychological helping professions (Capponi, 1992(Capponi, , 2003Shimrat, 1997); have staged Mad Pride events and conferences to reclaim mad identities and expose society's sanist practices; and have lobbied the Canadian government to review its legal practices that allow for mandatory detention and treatment (Crawford et al, 2019). Indeed, Mad Studies is now an established area of activism, scholarship, and teaching (see, e.g., LeFrançois et al, 2013;Burstow et al, 2014;Daley et al, 2019;Snyder et al, 2019).…”