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Short abstract:

Re;Minding Histories at the University of Sydney archives, witnesses, and interprets the history of community mental health and consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement in Australia. It involves collaboration between lived experience academic researchers and conventional academic researchers.

Long abstract:

In Australia during the 1960s, following processes of deinstitutionalisation,which saw the number of individuals confined to mental hospitals reduce greatly, a variety of forms of community mental health services emerged. The focus of the Re;Minding Histories group at the University of Sydney is in archiving, witnessing interpreting, and understanding the rich history of deinstitutionalisation, social psychiatry, community mental health, and consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement in Australia during this time of change. Our research involves collaboration between lived experience academic researchers (peer researchers) and conventional academic researchers, with research participants that are highly skilled, resourced, and committed to social justice.

Through our work we aim to challenge the academic orthodoxy that understands knowledge and history as objective, neutral, and ‘set’. Instead, we resist the epistemic injustice this represents by engaging with material from a dialogical, narrative, and emancipatory position grounded in the frameworks of 1. Co-production, 2. Open Dialogue 3. Critical Oral History and 4. Witnessing for Social Action. In this paper I will describe how we developed a democratic activist community for our research project and how we achieved embodied scholarship across digital and physical spaces through a pandemic landscape and beyond.