An Ethics of Care As Anti-Sanist and Anti-Racist Research Practice

With mad theory as methodology, there has been a plethora of research innovations that counter dominant biomedical narratives of disease, deviance and disturbance. The foregrounding of anti-racist and anti-sanist praxis within mad studies research has been key for many researchers but has been less well-attended to by others. This has led to wider questions around the origins of mad studies within social movements and the implications of these origins for the rise in community-based research practices. Arguably, an ethics of care emanating from mad communities and other social movements must better inform the epistemological, methodological and ethical approaches within community-based mad studies research. In particular, the ways in which queer of colour and mad community practice may be instructive to modes of research production within an academia that is at odds with mad and disability justice values will be discussed and underscored. Dr. Idil Abdillahi and Dr. Bren LeFrançois are two editors of the second edition of Mad Matters (along with Geoffrey Reaume), the seminal text in mad studies. In this presentation, they will provide an assessment of the evolution of mad studies as a field over the past 10 years, with special attention to research practices that centre mad people, mad knowledge and mad communities. In addition to critiques of expert-driven quantitative research practices that are inherently sanist and racist, mad studies foregrounds the importance of mad people as knowledge holders. Here, experiential knowledge is not seen as an add-on but instead as of central importance to knowledge production about madness, mad cultural production, mad interventions and the institutional failings of mad people.