Luke Kernan

Topic

Re-worlding the Self in Graphic Narratives— A Case Study of Sense, Affect, and Mad-Centered Knowledges of Psychosis

Department of Anthropology

Date & location

• Friday, September 13, 2024

• 9:00 A.M.

• Clearihue Building

• Room B007

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Alex Boudreault-Fournier, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria (Supervisor)

• Dr. Lisa Mitchell, Department of Anthropology, UVic (Member)

• Dr. Susan Berkhout, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto (Outside Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Neely Myers, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Bruce Wallace, School of Social Work, UVic

   

Abstract

This doctoral project, Re-worlding the Self in Graphic Narratives—A Case Study of Sense, Affect, and Mad-Centered Knowledges of Psychosis, collaboratively explores and addresses experiences of psychosis (sensory breaks from reality) with Mad-identifying participants who describe their earliest memories of these interior events from a sensorial and visual perspective. Co-creating an arts-based ethnography of psychosis through the ongoing production of artworks and media, I survey the ways that participants’ narratives of psychosis materialize through visual and poetic representations of their lived experiences of madness. I examine how individuals distressed by psychosis move beyond their symptomatic illnesses and narrowly prescribed identities and find new ground to (re)make themselves through expressive processes. Within a synergetic inter-arts research setting, I led a series of five online workshops with two unique groups of participants, each of whom had prior past episodes of psychosis and were immersed in outpatient mental health services. Participants drew from and upon their interior, emotionally charged experiences during

the workshops to develop multisensory and narrative drawings that became both prompt and foundation for subsequent individual interviews. We then collaborated on participant-led comics that became the foundational impetus for re-imagining the ethnographic text. Through this novel approach to arts-based research, I aimed to understand psychosis from empathic, sensorial, and visual perspectives. This project documents, engages, and theorizes the role of “psychosis” imagination and creativity in the lives of ten participants who have experienced psychosis as a life event and were involved in comics-making activities. Here, I track how participants, as cherished Mad interlocutors and co-collaborators, sought to resolve communication and subject-positioning issues that arose from the equally ineffable and challenging dynamics of psychosis and madness. These conflicts were internally registered and spurred a vital set of self-fashioning, polyphonic dialogics that primed my interlocutors for self-transformation and psychosis re-worldings. These collective efforts not only de-center ethnographic practice through research-creation strategies, but they succinctly clarify aspects of how madness and pressured, non-normative consciousness are experienced, generating a set of symbolic, poetic, and visual languages to capture expressions of psychosis. Moreover, as a collaborative research-creation practice, our extensive, year-long work aided in destigmatizing and reframing mental duress. Participants simultaneously developed ways to navigate emotional tensions, challenge points, and affective accruals wrought by psychosis through graphic narrative modalities, offering this practice as one that sees Mad-inclusive systems of living myth intertwined with post-traumatic growth