Paper short abstract:

This paper assesses results from my arts-based workshops, interviews, and research-creation projects which explore lived experiences of psychosis and sensorial alterities. These participant-led graphic narratives seek to empower Mad artists by harnessing new ethical relations.

Paper long abstract:

The Mad artist as a revolutionary figure is one who—by the necessity of their ostracization—resonates with the ongoing struggle of the undercommons (Harney, Moten 2013; Wilson 2004; Myers 2019). These Mad-identifying subjects are positioned by normative structures as outcasts and curiosities on multiple fronts (and offences)—within the art world, within patient-oriented research, within most forms of psychiatry, and within public discourse. However, the work of the undercommons is dependent upon these outsider visionaries, such that counter-cultural structures and activist collectives seeking equity and alignment with the Mad Pride Movement can offer safe harbour and open doors (radical inclusivity) for these fugitives (Bey 2019). One such space occurs within my doctoral fieldwork. I will survey findings from my arts-based workshops, interviews, and research-creation projects, which all explore lived experiences of psychosis and sensorial alterities. These phenomenological accounts and ethnographic retellings of participant's sensory lifeworlds expose and echo the implications of how autobiographical power (Myers, Ziv 2016), becoming (Biehl, Locke 2017), post-traumatic growth (Ng et al. 2021), and one's world-building efforts (Salazar et al. 2017) can elicit novel results, connections, and systematic changes across health disparities through the arts. The Mad artist's power, whom each participant mediates in their storytelling capacities (and in taking refuge within the matrixial borderspaces of the undercommons), is then situationally evoked through this project's ability to generate graphic narratives and comics that identify and harness new ethical relations (Ettinger 2018) to live by and, perhaps, reconfigure our futures within these havens.