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Seminer hosted by ISS21 Disability & Mental Health Cluster: 'Mad Studies and an Ethic of Unruliness'

18 Sep 2024

A seminar hosted by the ISS21 Disability & Mental Health Cluster, UCC Futures - Collective Social Futures and the School of Applied Social Studies took place this week at UCC.

Prof Bren A. LeFrançois, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada gave the talk and afterwards there was a discussion with social work students and other participants on the implications of mad studies for professional practice.



Abstract
The overwhelming presence of inequitable power relations and epistemic injustice continue to buoy our need to change how madness is understood and how mad people are treated and researched. This talk will provide an overview of Mad Studies as a theoretical lens, a methodology and an ethical practice. The concept of unruliness will be detailed along with an analysis of its importance in research, care work, activism and our day-to-day relations with each other.

Bren A. LeFrançois is a University Research Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. Their scholarship focusses on the psychiatrisation of young people and on anti-sanist, anti-colonial and anti-racist praxis. They are a co-editor (along with Geoffrey Reaume and Robert Menzies) of the edited volume Mad Matters which is currently being developed into its second edition (along with a new co-editor, Idil Abdillahi).

Thank you to Prof LeFrançois for their insightful talk and to everyone who attended and made this talk so engaging.

Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21)

Top Floor, Carrigbawn/Safari Building, Donovan Road, Cork, T12 YE30

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