Crafting Contention: The role of zines in contesting mental health knowledge and practice
A study exploring MadZines (self-published magazines, perzines, graphic memoirs and comics about madness, distress and psychosocial disabilities).
- Identifying how zines 'craft' specific forms of psychiatric contention (in content, form and style)
- Investigating zine's use of humour, parody and subversion.
- Exploring how zines can be used to resist marginalisation and pathologisation and offer alternative sources of information and support.
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Explore the pedagogical potential of zines to transform professional and lay thinking about mental health; combat stigma, oppression and discrimination; and influence policy and practice.
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Understand how critical approaches to mental health can be researched, understood and disseminated through zines.
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Transform the way zines are understood, theorised, researched and utilised.
We will develop a methodology that is congruent, with zine ethics and practice. Using a Mad Studies lens, we will draw on dialogical narrative analysis and new materialism.
Project lead: Professor Helen Spandler
Researcher: Dr. Jill Anderson
PhD student: Tamsin Walker
Project illustrator, Dr. Jackie Batey (University of Portsmouth).
We are also working with individual zinesters and partner organisations.
You can follow on-going progress of the project at our MadZines blogsite
3 years: 2020-23