Mad Matters Two: Book Launch

Two of the editors, Dr. Idil Abdillahi and Dr. Bren LeFrançois, will discuss this groundbreaking book in Mad Studies.

Mad studies is a field of activist scholarship that focuses on the knowledges, histories, cultures, and politics of mad social movements and of people deemed mad within psychiatric and mental health services. 'Mad' in this context is a reclaimed term and identity.

Dr. Idil Abdillahi is an Associate Professor in the School of Disability Studies, cross-appointed to the School of Social Work at Toronto Metropolitan University. Broadly, her work focuses on Black life, livability, carcerality, and refusal. She is the author or co-author of several texts, including Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty, & the Violence of Social Assistance (2022) and BlackLife: Post BLM and The Struggle for Freedom (2019).

B. A. LeFrançois is a poet and a University Research Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Their research and scholarship focuses on the psychiatrization of children, mad community praxes, and the ethics of care including care work within research. Bren has been engaging in critical pedagogy from mad studies and critical mental health perspectives for the past 30 years and has published widely on these and related topics.

There will be a discussion of the contents of this second edition, time for questions and conversations, and a free book giveaway!