Global ETD Search

1	When "the words don't fit you": Reflections on Madness and Nonsense Emily, Scherzinger January 2022 (has links) Divided into three substantial chapters, this dissertation centres on the interconnections of madness and nonsense. In particular, the introduction analyzes theories on nonsense literature, and the binaric logics that separately structure the discursive fields of these two phenomena. In this section, there is also a deconstruction of the problematics of analyzing nonsense as a literary technique without the influence of mad studies. The first chapter then moves to take on the figure of the Western serial killer, and the hermeneutic projects that the media takes on when reporting on his “senseless” crimes. Arguing that the labelling of the serial killer’s crimes as “nonsensical” demonstrates a particular aesthetic that works to associate madness with danger, disease, fear, and hatred within the public imaginary, this dissertation offers an analysis through a reading of Lynn Crosbie’s Paul’s Case. In the final chapter, this dissertation employs Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder to consider nonsensical madness within the context of feminine subjectivity. Considering autotheory as a feminist hermeneutic practice then leads into the author’s own experiences as a mad person. This dissertation aims to consider how to engage with nonsensically mad feminine texts, and the ethics of the hermeneutics of mad reading-projects. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Why do we deem certain groups of people nonsensical? Why is nonsense considered the ‘mother-tongue’ of madness? This dissertation attempts to unfold some of the dimensions of these questions through an historical taxonomy of madness and nonsense as separate yet connected phenomena; an analysis of the media and popular categorization of the Western serial killer; and feminine people deemed ‘mad’ via hysteria. Using their own experiences of madness, the author asks how we can possibly read mad articulations when they are often chalked up to nonsense, as well as the sociopolitical implications of this configuration of nonsense and madness. Mad Studies Nonsense Literature Poststructural feminism Deleuze
2	Analyzing Ann Quin’s and Kate Millett’s Forgotten Works Through a Mad Reading Practice and Feminist Literary Criticism Harrison, Sarah 11 1900 (has links) In my thesis, I engage with recent scholarship in Mad Studies directed towards introducing a Mad reading practice or Mad theory to the discipline of English and academia more broadly. I utilize Mad theory and feminist literary criticism in order to frame my analysis of two forgotten queer Madwomen—British author Ann Quin (1936-1973) and American author, artist, and activist Kate Millett (1934-Present). I consider how Quin’s novel Three (1966) and Millett’s autobiography Flying (1974), as experimental texts exploring bisexuality and polyamory que(e)ry heteronormative monogamy and patriarchal literary convention. I also posit that Quin’s “The Unmapped Country” (1973) and Millett’s The Loony-Bin Trip (1990) deconstruct a perceived tension in feminist literary criticism surrounding whether the figure of the Madwoman is a subversive or silenced figure. In using a Mad reading practice, my analysis focuses on the intersections of sanism with other forces of oppression, as well as how sanist epistemic violence dissuades critically analyzing Mad individuals’ creative or personal narratives as theoretical and political texts. Moreover, I gesture towards the overlooked social exclusions produced by sanist epistemic violence, such as forced institutionalization, unemployment, criminalisation, and homelessness, which suggests the ethical importance of incorporating Mad theory into everyday practice. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) Mad Studies Feminist literary criticism Ann Quin Kate Millett
3	“We Can't Help You Here”: Exploring the Experiences of Youth with Undiagnosed Mental Health Concerns who are Streamed into Alternative Education Stothart, Laura 22 November 2018 (has links) Relying on the perspectives of critical disability studies and mad studies, this graduate thesis seeks to uncover the experiences of youth with undiagnosed mental health issues who have been streamed into alternative education. Guided by methodological principles of interpretive phenomenological analysis and arts-informed inquiry, the 5 participants in this study were invited to a focus group where they could engage in an arts-based activity, meant to provide the opportunity to reflect on their experience, build rapport with the researcher, express themselves through alternative means, and connect with peers who have shared experience. Participants were then invited to discuss their experiences with the topic in a one-on-one, semi-structured interview. This study reveals the ways in which the system of education, school communities, teachers, and social workers can support youth who are not diagnosed with a mental illness but still experience mental health challenges that impede on their school experience. Supported by mad studies, this study reveals how peer support has become the method of mental health response and treatment through which students feel is most effective. This study also challenges medical hegemony and the ways in which access to services is dependent on medical diagnoses. Finally, this study reminds stakeholders of the value of building trusting and empathic relationships between school staff and students. School communities and school boards are challenged to think about the structuring of their systems, and the ways in which they may present barriers to the success of all students regardless of ability and/or need. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW) mental health alternative education peer support mad studies critical disability studies arts-informed process youth
4	Good Kids, mad Schools Khurana, Madhav January 2017 (has links) The western world has long viewed ‘mental illness’ from a biomedical perspective; treating the brain the same way it treats physical issues, through diagnosis, medication and clinical intervention. We however tend to forget that a person is interdependent on her or his environment, and resultantly we frame the person as ill or weak rather than the environment as sick, or ‘mad’. With this thesis I assess how mental health and ‘mental illness’ are being framed within secondary schools in the province of Ontario (Canada). I achieve this by analyzing mental health strategies using a theoretical lens developed from Critical Disability Theory and Mad Studies. Through use of a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) I analyzed a total of 4 mental health strategies from the federal government, the Ontario government and 2 Ontario school boards. My findings indicated that these mental health strategies generally subscribe to a medical or individualized understandings of mental health, and overlook the disabling influence that the school environment can have on the student. By minimizing the role of the social and physical environment on student mental health schools are reinforcing the dominant discourse, which is that distresses in mental health are the result of an individual deficit caused by a brain defect or personal weakness. This discourse has far reaching consequences that may contribute to many Ontario students not receiving the support they desire. I contend that social workers employed by school boards can be influential in challenging these dominant framings of mental health and carry forward the standpoint that the school environment and its social structures play a principal role in the mental health of students. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW) Mental Health Mental Illness Critical Disability Mad Studies Friendship Haters Beware Schools Students Neoliberalism Medical Model Gangsta Ontario
5	Bad Avatar: Mad/Crip Digital Identity Play Jerreat-Poole, Adan January 2020 (has links) This thesis examines the fissures and intersections between feminist digital media, queer theory, and Mad and disability studies. Moving across social media platforms, hashtag data, and digital gaming, this project argues for the subversive and creative potential within Mad/crip/queer digital identity performances. My theorizing of the avatar as an automedial figure in this project is attentive to the politics of the face as a site of encounter, to digital bodies and movement, to identification and community-building, and to embodiment and affects that move between on- and off-screen lives. This thesis follows the “bad avatar,” a collection of Mad digital identity practices that interrupt, disrupt, and transgress normalizing and normative digital spaces of North American settler capitalist culture. Claiming the bad avatar as a deliberate identity position is an act of claiming the label of “bad,” which here has multiple meanings: Mad queer bodies—physical and digital—are bad citizens because we break the heteronormative patriarchal rules. We’re troublemakers—we make trouble for power systems and those who embody power. We can be bad workers, unproductive and fatigued. We can be bad for capitalism and bad for nationalist morale. We also experience feelings that become pathologized and policed. As despair, panic, melancholy, and angst stick to our bodies our bodies themselves become framed as bad: sick, broken, wrong, a problem in need of fixing or eradication. Reclaiming “bad” is both a celebration of the willful subject (Ahmed 2014) and a challenge to the binary of “good/bad” that is used to oppress Mad and disabled bodies. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis theorizes the digital avatar as an automedial figure, a mode of virtual embodiment and a site of encounter. I use “avatar” to draw a connecting line between widely varied digital identity acts that occur across social media platforms and video games. This thesis examines the “bad avatar,” a collection of Mad/crip/disabled faces, bodies, and identity practices that interrupt, disrupt, and transgress the normalizing and normative digital spaces of North American settler capitalist culture. Mad/crip digital identity play offers avenues for enacting modes of resistance through the politics of representation and the processes of identity performance and community-building.
6	Representing Depression In A Video Game Trailer In Order To Combat Sanism Tert, Noor, Lindqvist, Viktor January 2023 (has links) The aim of this study is to explore the research question “Can the Research through Design (RtD) critical note-taking guidelines be utilized in the pre-production and design of a video game trailer to combat sanism?”. To achieve this, the research involved gathering previous studies on representing mental illness, as well as examining fictional and non-fictional experiences of depression depicted in games, journals, and books. These sources serve as anchors, as described by Sadokierski (2019), while also utilizing parts of Sadokierski’s critical journaling guidelines for note-taking. Drawing inspiration from the gathered material, the study focuses on designing the character, game and narrative before proceeding to create a rough draft. The findings from the trailer’s design process indicate that Sanism can be addressed by challenging negative stereotypes and avoiding their perpetuation. This study demonstrates an example of how actively avoiding stereotypes, drawing inspiration from first-hand experiences, and incorporating metaphors may combat Sanism and foster a more positive outlook on mental illness through a video game trailer. Thus, while we perceived that the utilization of the critical note-taking guidelines in the pre-production and design of the trailer were useful, the results of the study were not conclusive since it requires testing and evaluation in future studies. Therefore, it is recommended that further research be conducted in order to explore to what extent utilizing the RtD critical note-taking guidelines, in the design process, may aid in avoiding the perpetuation of stereotypes and reduction of stereotyping by actively challenging them. Mad studies Sanism Animation Game design Depression Stereotyping Representation Media and Communications Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap Other Humanities not elsewhere specified Övrig annan humaniora
7	Living A Mad Politics: Affirming Mad Onto-Ethico-Epistemologies Through Resonance, Resistance, and Relational Redress of Epistemic-Affective Harm de Bie, Alise January 2019 (has links) Drawing on the theoretical influences of Mad and Disability Studies; philosophical conceptualizations of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), ethical loneliness (Stauffer, 2015), and psycho-emotional disablism (Reeve, 2012; Thomas, 1999; 2007); disability/service user/feminist ethics; a decade of Mad Movement community organizing; as well as autobiographical illustrations and empirical data from two collaborative research projects, this thesis describes my efforts to live a Mad politics in the community, academy, and social work education. Central to this politics, and to the overall contribution of the thesis, is its focus on (1) the recognition and redress of affective-epistemic harms that are often ignored by legislative/social welfare approaches to in/justice; and (2) the generation and refinement of Mad knowledge/ways of knowing that respond to our own priorities as Mad people, rather than those of mental health systems. It contributes to these areas of Mad Studies theory in several ways: First, by recognizing and politicizing the often ignored affective-epistemic effects of abandonment and neglect Mad people experience from society, including loneliness, anger, resentment, distrust, low expectations of others and lack of confidence. Second, by seeking new conceptualizations (such as epistemic loneliness) and contributing to existing ones (like expectations of just treatment, psycho-emotional disablism) in order to more adequately interpret and attest to these harms and call for their redress. Third, by affirming emergent Mad moral and epistemological frameworks, especially those that manifest in the aftermath of harm and account for ontologies of knowing. Fourth, by developing Survivor/Service User Research approaches to analysis (listening for resonance, everyday forms of service user resistance, and ‘quiet’ data) that value affective engagements with data and perceive and respond to Mad onto-ethico-epistemologies in and on their own terms. Ultimately, this work calls for greater relational justice, and an expansion of what we owe each other. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis contributes to Mad theory by recording some of the things I learned while trying to survive in the world, community organizing, the academy, and social work education as a Mad person. To do so, I reflect on the existential and ethical questions I brought to my doctoral studies, the people, texts, and concepts that I found particularly good company during this time, and my Mad methods of living/doing/knowing. Three separate but interconnected articles then follow. These are about (1) moving with loneliness as a Mad student; (2) resisting unmet expectations as service user ethics, and (3) how pedagogical partnerships between students and faculty/staff can cultivate marginalized students’ confidence in their knowledge. The thesis ends with a discussion of its overall contributions to how we conceptualize the psycho-emotional harms produced through sanism/disablism and the ways we understand what Mad knowledge is and how it is generated. Ethical loneliness Epistemic injustice Service user ethics Social work ethics Mad Studies Disability Studies Mad epistemology Psycho-emotional disablism Psychiatric survivor analysis Resistance Mad students Abandonment Relational justice
8	Reading Through Madness: Counter-Psychiatric Epistemologies and the Biopolitics of (In)sanity in Post-World War II Anglo Atlantic Women's Narratives Wolframe, PhebeAnn M. 04 1900 (has links) <p>In my dissertation, I advance an interpretive perspective that emerges from the politics of the Mad Movement (also known as the Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/Ex-patient Movement). This movement began in the 1970s in response to patient abuses in the psychiatric system and continues today in various forms. I argue that literary studies, which often reads madness in the reductive terms of psychiatric diagnosis or which renders madness as metaphor, would benefit from mad perspectives; likewise, literary studies has much to offer the nascent field of Mad(ness) Studies in terms of methods for locating the discursive conditions of madness’ emergence. Drawing on Foucault’s work on madness and biopolitics; poststructuralist feminism; Disability Studies; and Mad Movement writings, I concentrate on texts which narrate intersecting experiences of madness, resistance, community and identity: Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit (1947), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1994), Claire Allen’s Poppy Shakespeare (2007), Liz Kettle’s Broken Biscuits (2007), Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me (2010), Persimmon Blackbridge’s Prozac Highway (2000), Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985) and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2004). I further explore mad reading practices through my reading of a blog project I conducted for research purposes in which people with experience of the mental health system reviewed depictions of madness and mental health treatment in literature, film, popular culture and news media. In reading through a mad perspective, I postulate some of the material and ideological effects that establishing mad reading practices and communities might have. I consider how madness is gendered, and how it intersects with other aspects of embodiment such as race, class and sexuality; how narratives of madness elucidate the relationship between psychiatry and colonialism, patriarchy, eugenics and neoliberalism; and how they invite us to question the limits of reason, truth and subjectivity.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Mad Studies Disability Studies Literature in English, British Isles Literature in English, North America Women's Studies
9	Troubling Peer Support Institutionalization: A Mad Institutional Ethnography; Or, Everyday Documentation, De/Valuing, & Values Work in Institutionalized Peer Support / Peer Support Institutionalization: Troubling Everyday Work Prowse, Calvin 17 November 2022 (has links) A short (11 page) plain language summary is available under the filename "Research Summary_Peer Support Institutionalization - Troubling Everyday Work.pdf" / This study explores how the everyday work of peer supporters working within institutionalized settings are shaped by institutional forces (“ruling relations”), through a series of four (peer support) focus groups and interviews with five peer support workers in Ontario. I explore peer supporters’ approaches to writing, reading, and verbally sharing information about their peers (“documentation work”), and reveal how their experiences and “felt troubles” relating to documentation are shaped by ideas of (clinical) confidentiality constructed in the Personal Health Information Protection Act (2004). I also explore how both lived experience and peer support are devalued through the ways organizations and clinicians determine and describe the value of healthcare roles (“de/valuing work”), and reveal how peer supporters’ experiences of being (de)valued are shaped by discourses of “professional/ism” which equate being a professional to having a post-secondary education and working through clinical frameworks. I describe the work that peer supporters, clinicians, and organizations (can) engage in to ground peer support workers within peer values and approaches (“values work”) through accessing peer community and fostering environments of peer culture. I draw on these suggestions and the findings of the study to provide recommendations for peer support workers, organizations and clinical workers, the peer support sector as a whole, and research/ers. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW) peer support mental health substance use institutionalization professionalization institutional ethnography addiction mental illness consumer/survivor movement Mad studies lived experience experiential knowledge healthcare PHIPA confidentiality personal health information compensation professionalism peer culture peer community peer drift peer relationship peer confidentiality documentation value values
10	Particularly Responsible: Everyday Ethical Navigation, Concrete Relationships, and Systemic Oppression Chapman, Christopher Stephen 20 August 2012 (has links) In this dissertation, I articulate what I call a personal-is-political ethics, suggesting that the realm of human affairs long called ethics is inseparable from that which is today normatively called psychology. Further, I suggest that these names for this shared realm are situated in different discursive traditions which, therefore, provide different parameters for possible action and understanding. In my exploration of what it is to be human, I strategically centre ethical transgressions, particularly those that are mappable onto systemic forms of oppression. I explore personal-is-political enactments of sexism, ableism, racism, colonization, classism, ageism, and geopolitics, including situations in which several of these intersect with one another and those in which therapeutic, pedagogical, or parenting hierarchies also intersect with them. Without suggesting this is ‘the whole story,’ I closely read people’s narrations of ethical transgressions that they – that we – commit. I claim that such narrations shape our possibilities for harming others, for taking responsibility, and for intervening in others’ lives in an attempt to have them take responsibility (e.g., therapy with abuse perpetrators and critical pedagogy). I work to demonstrate the ethical and political importance of: the impossibility of exhaustive knowledge, the illimitable and contingent power relations that are ever-present and give shape to what we can know, and the ways our possibilities in life are constituted through particular contact with others. I explore ethical transgressions I have committed, interrogating these events in conversation with explorations of resonant situations in published texts, as well as with research conversations with friends about their ethical transgressions and how they make sense of them. I tentatively advocate for, and attempt to demonstrate, ways of governing ourselves when we are positioned ‘on top’ of social hierarchies – in order to align our responses and relationships more closely with radical political commitments. systemic oppression ethics performativity différance governmentality subjectification relationality taking responsibility power/knowledge accountability personal-is-political deconstruction narrative practice racism sexism ableism colonialism decolonization whiteness masculinity abuse harm invitational practice complicity reflexivity self-critique resonance pedagogy flows of becoming queer theory disability studies critical social work therapy power ethical narrative political rationality treatment violence mad studies antipsychiatry psychology gendered peer abuse abuse intervention abuse perpetration intentional states friendship auto-ethnography critical pedagogy An Ethics Inaccessible to Liberalism 0733 0626 0452 0740 0628 0422 0998 0340 0451 0622 0384

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