The following essay was submitted in July 2023 for the third module on the MSc Mad Studies at Queen Margaret University, XM016 - Practices of Public Sociology.
MAD STUDIES: PLAYING IN THE BORDERLANDS
Public sociology generally seems to insist on bridging the private world of the academy with the public world of the subaltern as its distinguishing feature,
In bridging the boundary between the community and academia for the purpose of social change, activist scholars argue for the importance of praxis to enhance the links between experience, political struggle, and theoretical analysis. (Naples, 2010, p.510)
This appears on the surface to be a totally admirable aim. However, I wish to question that, suggesting that drawing on border thinking, public sociology should not be about bridging at all, but embracing borderness, that is occupying the space between the community and the academy. It can be debated whether this is true of all areas of public sociology, but it will be shown here that this is certainly the case when it comes to Mad Studies.
It’s important to not frame Mad Studies as a variety of public sociology. In fact, I would rather see public sociology as subsidiary to Mad Studies rather than the reverse. At the most fundamental epistemic level, Mad Studies challenges what constitutes rational knowledge in the first place. It should play the important role of unsettling the very notion of the academy itself “because universities are the place of reason” (Ingram, 2016, p.14) and are therefore also crucial in defining what is not reason. This is precisely the border between sanity/madness. The academy is involved in designating what knowledge or activities may appear within its borders and what should be excluded. If public sociology is to be truly a praxis, then it cannot reinforce distinctions between the public and the private, academy and community, between rationality and irrationality, reason and unreason, sanity and insanity, that all undermine its ability to constitute meaningful activism. This is praxis that recognises that theory and practice are not separate activities, but a wholly synthetic “communion” (Freire, 2000). It’s in this sense that Mad Studies can be seen to supersede not only public sociology, but the academy itself.
Considering its crucial role on this frontier, I’m specifically interested in exploring the role of students as it relates to the MSc Mad Studies programme at QMU in Edinburgh. Burawoy sees the students' role in public sociology as becoming ambassadors “to the wider world just as they bring back to the classroom their engagement with diverse publics” (Burawoy, 2005, p.8). Aside from being problematically wrapped up in a student/teacher divide, this suggests that the role of the activist student be tied to that of what border thinking would call a “border crosser” with the goal, like public sociology, to be to “bridge the academy/community divide in innovative ways” (Armstrong and LeFrançois, 2021, p.324). This approach simply reinforces divisions that underlie sanism. It’s just not good enough. What I suggest instead is that we should rather embrace and use our position as border people.
BORDER THINKING
As Anzaldua writes, border people are the prohibited and forbidden inhabitants of a borderland, which is “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Anzaldua, 1987, p.3). Here we are concerned with Mad Studies students (and scholars in general) in the space between the academy and the community. Importantly, “identifying a border existence in the context of madness allows for movement away from the ableist assumption that one is either sane or mad, that one can never simultaneously exist between both spaces” (Kafai, 2012). Rather to occupy the borderlands is to embrace an ontology of difference that “is neither one or two, nor the relation of the two; it is in the in-between, the border or line of flight…[of] becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.293). Crucially, as I have argued elsewhere, this deterritorializing force of becoming is central to the experience of madness (and play) because it breaks apart the dualistic thinking of identitarian binary oppositions that forms the very basis of consensus reality. Mad Studies students must work to draw on this to open up this borderland as beyond the academy/community and the rational/irrational. That is to say rather than bridging it should be a movement that resists/desists both the academy and the community by disrupting both. This is to say that we should be making “the border—the most marginal place—the centre of political action” (Nasser, 2021, p.31). One can think about this distinction in terms of the basic schematic below:
"Bridging"
"Bordering"
MAD STUDIES MEETUPS
To this end, since the beginning of my time in the Mad Studies course at QMU I have been eager to see Mad Studies become something like the Hearing Voices movement but with a much broader potential in terms of encompassing all individuals and experiences that society or the academy might deem mad. The idea being that people from all walks of life could come together to share in and “study” “madness”. This would make it integral to the mad movement, rather than relate to any interest in gaining academic (or public) credibility for the study of madness that would totally undermine what should be a challenge to the very foundations of what constitutes acceptable knowledge or perceptions of reality in the first place i.e. to Western rationality itself. This view seems to resonate with the tōjisha-kenkyū (science of self) movement in Japan, which is based on the idea that
Instead of being passive ‘patients’ who felt they needed to keep their heads down and be ashamed for acting differently, [individuals] become active ‘researchers’ of their own ailments…deny[ing] labels such as ‘victim’, ‘patient’ or ‘minority’, [thereby helping] to reclaim their agency (Ayaya and Kitanaka, 2023)
Indeed, my vision before starting the course was that in a co-planning arrangement with students, the MSc in Mad Studies would be a space-building project from the beginning, with active involvement in generating public awareness and discussion of this development inside and outside the academy, moving to create a space that would be both but neither i.e. a borderland. Unfortunately, the existing practice of Mad Studies at QMU appears to not be a praxis at all, but rather simply a repetition of existing approaches to knowledge production.
In light of this, along with another student, we decided to establish a public Mad Studies Discord channel, which was designed to become a space in the borderland in which anyone interested could share resources, insights, ideas and so forth. After initially gaining around 50 members, from a variety of backgrounds - academics, students, survivors etc., it has been a noteworthy failure. Originally, this also featured a nightly live drop-in hosted by myself and another student on the MSc, offered as a space for totally open discussion regarding relevant topics, without any claim to providing any kind of support, or framed within existing frameworks of responsibility, such as being “trauma-informed”. Despite some visitors, we abandoned the project after two weeks due to lack of interest.
Nevertheless, some of the conversations did point to the idea that “breaking boundaries and borders [is an] act that is imaginable only from the borderlands” (Nasser, 2021, p.32). The only major event on the server was when I shared my own positive experiences with the UK branch of the Scientology affiliated organisation, The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR, 2023). Another member of the server found reported “this concerns me…Scientology is an exploitative, controlling institution. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend!” (2blackcatsinatrenchcoat qtd in Mad Studies Public Discord, 2023). I contested that this was “simply a sharing of information based on experience” (unchange2change qtd in Mad Studies Public Discord, 2023). Ultimately, two other users expressed the idea that “this space is supposed to be safer and dismissing someone's concerns is not trauma-informed” (kevix qtd in Mad Studies Public Discord, 2023) and another that they had “trouble with the idea of sharing resources without guidelines for care and safety” (Bekah qtd in Mad Studies Public Discord, 2023). It seems that Mad Studies, if it is to be an authentically bordering movement, needs to break with the ideologies of “trauma-informed” “safe” spaces etc. that constrain discussion. One user even claimed that the server was “not a safe place for open discussion” (bcmpinc qtd in Mad Studies Public Discord, 2023). Such views are contradictory: genuinely open discussion cannot be limited by safety concerns. Ultimately, “the language of safety contributes to the replication of dominance and subordination, rather than a dismantling thereof” (Arao and Clemens, 2013, p.139). Indeed, just like territorial borders, they must rather be expected to be unsafe and this is integral to their potential to break with existing limits in radical ways; it is in their lack of safety that borderlands are spaces “where weapons abound” (Liebert, 2018). It’s frequently suggested that it is better to use a framework of “brave space” rather than “safe space”. However, bordering spaces should not be limited by any preconceived expectations at all, for doing so undermines their potential to open up “a radical praxis of healing, pedagogy, and protest premised on magical ideation, on making space for imagination, for correspondence with an-other world, here-now” (Liebert, 2018, p.139).
Due to a continued refusal to see Mad Studies condemned to obscurity in the academy, we further established a local meetup group in Edinburgh and Glasgow using the Meetup website/app that would provide the same kind of space for discussion but in-person. Similar to the Discord, this has garnered surprisingly little interest. Most of the regular attendees are students on the QMU course, although there has been a stream of guests, particularly in the early days. Regardless, the conversations have been marked by their frank openness. The first meeting saw one attendee discuss unabashedly at length their experience with dark forces hiding under the surface of Edinburgh society, as others listened attentively. Whilst another attendee expressed their desire to come off antipsychotic medication, which I personally encouraged based on my own experience, whilst another Mad Studies student found this unacceptable and subsequently raised concerns. This seemed to be based on assumptions very much like the criticisms of the Discord server, that somehow such spaces must limit discussion in some way so as to protect members. Much like my sharing of experience regarding the CCHR, my own anti-medication stance and experience of coming off meds cold turkey is just my own experience. If this can’t be aired in this context, where can it be done? It has to be accepted that these borderlands “are a site of undefined boundaries, of dangers and misunderstandings, a precarious environment” (Nasser, 2021, p.28) and this is precisely what gives them radical disruptive potential.
One regular attendee seems to have been rather more at ease in such a space, feeling that their life has been “enriched by the comparing of notes” seeing it as “uniquely welcoming venue to speak about experiences and views that contest the prevailing Cartesian worldview, and are thus often considered taboo in ‘polite company’” (TF 2023, personal communication, 30 July). This concurs with Anzaldua’s view that the in-between space of the borderland, allows one “to see through the fiction of the monoculture” as “seeing from two or more perspectives simultaneously renders those cultures transparent” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p.549). In contrast to a bridging movement that maintains the integrity of the academy and the community, engaging in such open dialogues within the borderland challenges what it is acceptable to discuss. On one side, academic discussion of madness is limited by rationality, whereas discussion of madness in the community is, it seems, limited by safety concerns. This seems to be particularly true in that dominant understandings of madness continue to frame these experiences in relation to mental health. Consequently, public discussions/meetups surrounding madness seem trapped in providing support, advocacy, safe spaces and so on. A meaningful Mad Studies in the borderlands decries the constraints on both sides of the border, focusing on truly open discussion that allows for the free study of madness.
PLAYING IN THE BORDERLANDS
Part of the issue here is that both sides of the border, I believe, are plagued by perspectives of madness that treat it with a grave over-seriousness that ensures its maintenance as an entity to be confined. The community remains for the most part stuck in the “medical nemesis” of mental health discourses that treats the world as a hospital ward (Illich, 1976). In the academy, even if this has progressed in terms of incorporating or centering those with lived experience as in Mad Studies, continues to treat madness and mad people as an object of study as “something over there, to be observed and discussed, as if we have emptied a cage in a zoo and now ask what animal shall be placed inside of it” (Garson, 2022, p.263)
I suggest what a Mad Studies in the borderlands needs is the antidote of seeing madness-as-play (Rapti and Gordon, 2021). At Bethel in Hokkaido, where the tōjisha-kenkyū emerged, originally a peer-support group that is now a model alternative to long-term institutionalisation, “people are encouraged to talk about their hallucinations and delusions. Thus, hallucinations and delusions become communal property, something that everyone can talk about and deal with.” (Nakamura, 2013). This culminates in an annual festival which includes a Hallucination and Delusion Grand Prix (which has been aired on national TV), during which people are invited to “listen and laugh alongside Bethel members who share stories of their hallucinations and delusions. Afterwards, the audience votes to decide who should win first prize for the most hilarious or moving account” (Ayaya and Kitanaka, 2023). So instead of shutting the door on mad experiences or treating them with profound spiritual significance, individuals who have largely reclaimed their agency tend towards, what Dr. Kawamura, a psychiatrist and one of the founders of Bethel, argues is crucial about the whole project, namely “a certain degree of being able to let things go” (Nakamura, 2013). This is the “joyous cosmology” of play (Watts, 2013).
CONCLUSION
Moving forward, Mad Studies students must do more to continue opening up the borderlands. It has been really disappointing to see how little interest there has been on both sides of the border. On the academic side, the MSc at QMU is basically a traditional academic programme that simply reinforces the academic/community divide, failing to see that Mad Studies must, by definition, reject this physical and psychical border. On the community side, the public appears mostly uninterested in setting up madness as something to be discussed and studied openly by individuals themselves, preferring instead to prioritise safety concerns that reinforce notions of danger that are central to psychiatry (Foucault, 1988, p.188). Instead, in seeing Mad Studies as a bordering movement, we take up the guerilla-like approach of tōjisha-kenkyū (Ayaya and Kitanaka, 2023) that has no interest in bridging the academy with the community, but rather not content with bordering alone instead draws on both by playing in the borderlands:
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