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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how collaborative narrative practices produce experiential knowledge in polarised mental health contexts. Based on ethnography in a therapeutic community in Portugal, it examines how lived experience negotiates authority, care, and conflict across institutional boundaries.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how experiential knowledge is produced, negotiated, and gains authority within polarised mental health worlds. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic research conducted in a therapeutic community in Portugal, it explores tensions between institutionalised disciplinary discourses centred on abstinence, moral responsibility, and standardised recovery, and residents’ lived experiences of care, suffering, belonging, and moral uncertainty. Photography and digital storytelling workshops were developed as collaborative, arts-based spaces for ethnographic experimentation. Rather than eliciting linear or normative recovery narratives, these practices enabled participants to articulate situated accounts that diverged from biomedical and institutional logics of illness and treatment. The resulting multimodal narratives foregrounded memories, affects, social bonds, ambiguities, and ethical dilemmas often marginalised within therapeutic protocols and evaluative metrics. I argue that these collaborative practices function simultaneously as research methods and as forms of care. They generate experiential knowledge that does not simply oppose biomedical frameworks but exists in tension with them, negotiating legitimacy, recognition, and authority within institutional settings. The paper shows how narrative, image, and collective reflection operate as everyday strategies of resistance and re-existence, allowing conflict to be held rather than resolved. By tracing how experiential knowledge circulates within and beyond the therapeutic community, the paper demonstrates how lived experience can foster fragile forms of collectivity across divergent positions, while remaining vulnerable to moralisation, co-optation, and epistemic flattening. It shows how collaborative, arts-based ethnography illuminates the coexistence of care and conflict, and how experiential knowledge can reconfigure moral, affective, and institutional boundaries in polarised mental health contexts.