Contribution short abstract:

This presentation stresses the challenge of framing psychosis narratives within an expressive ethnographic medium such as comics. The expansive interplay between madness and ontological poetics becomes a way participants can co-author social worlds together through art-making.

Contribution long abstract:

Ethnographic practices which involve art-making, comics (Atalay et al. 2019; Dix et al. 2019), and hybrid forms of expression (Collins et al. 2017) with participating communities and one's interlocutors bring forth several dynamics in their manifestation. These may involve 'imaginative ethnography' (Elliot and Culhane 2016) and 'future worlds' intermeshed within sets of 'living mythologies' (Salazar et al 2017; Young 1983). Specifically, this presentation proposes how to methodologically balance the poetic blasting of the self in creating new boundary spaces for voicing Mad-inclusive identities in anthropology. The work of social scientists (Vannini 2015; Tarr et al. 2018; Kernan 2020) has also shown particularly that arts-based workshops can be effective sites to explore the shifting forms, vitalities, and relational dynamics of the self—which, in effect, can (re)construct the flow of its socio-cultural enactment (Jenkins 2015). That said, this presentation argues for a collaborative model of how to co-author an ethnographic comic based in sensory descriptions of psychosis. In turn, these ontological struggles (Kohn 2015) may re-envision how communication and interior psychology become reconceptualized in anthropology. This research-creation talk aims to briefly situate how the validity of these forms of communal storytelling can strategically disrupt normative thought (Snyder et al. 2019) in carving out new ethical paradigms (Ettinger 2018). As anthropology learns to embrace these underrepresented narratives as legitimate knowledge-making endeavours, this newfound empathy and tact imagination positions anthropologists to better track how human beings can relate to one another through collective world-making efforts.

E-paper: this Contribution will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed