Maddening Poetics

Our Maddening Poetics event is an opportunity to explore the possibilities for poetics to be maddened through and with Mad Studies. Bringing together poetic performance and community dialogue, this event will highlight the mad poetic pieces featured in the first issue of the International Mad Studies Journal and upcoming second issue. Recognizing the imaginative, creative, and generative possibilities of poetics to transcend the “real”, the here and the now, we invite you to join us in co-creating new horizons for mad poetics within and beyond Mad Studies.

Join Adam Davies (discussant) with Rosiel Elwyn and Jersey Cosantino who will be reading from their own mad poetic pieces and reflecting madly on the possibilities of maddening poetics. Please note this event will be video recorded.

You may wish to explore some of Adam, Rosiel and Jersey's work if you are not familiar already. (Rosiel and Jersey will read from the works highlighted in bold.)

Adam:

• Maddening pre-service early childhood education and care through poetics: Dismantling epistemic injustice through mad autobiographical poetics: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14639491231155555
• Mad Autobiographical Stories, Poetry, and Resistances within Post-Secondary Early Childhood Education and Care https://assets.nationbuilder.com/aeceo/pages/2524/attachments/original/1705679523/eceLINK_Winter_2024_Mad_Autobiographical_Stories__Poetry__and_Resistances.pdf?1705679523

Rosiel:

• Catatonic Cocoon: https://imsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/elwyn-2024-catatonic-cocoon-imsj-preprint.pdf
• Akathisiacs: https://imsj.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/imsj/article/view/5252/4249
• Submitting Survivorship: https://imsj.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/imsj/article/view/5242/4237
• All other scholarship: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0yHzVP4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

Jersey: 

• "Now Don't Say We Didn't Warn You" A Poetic Meditation on the Im(Possibilities) of Mad Trans Time: https://imsj.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/imsj/article/view/5240
• All other scholarship including poetic pieces: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IwL-GdAAAAAJ&hl=en 

And if you'd like to know a bit more about Adam, Rosiel and Jersey...

Adam Davies (they/them) is a white settler who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Mississaugas of the New Credit in what is colonially known as Guelph, Ontario. Adam is a queer, nonbinary, Mad, neurodivergent educator, activist, and academic and Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Canada. Adam's work engages with questions of queerness, madness, and neurodiversity, as well as epistemic justice within and outside of education. Adam holds a PhD in Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. 

Rosiel (they/them) is a lived experience researcher, PhD student, and Master of Psychology graduate. Their PhD is in the field of neuroscience and mental health, exploring the mechanisms of trauma and adversity in the neurobiology of ‘anorexia nervosa’. Rosiel also works as a lived experience researcher, advisory committee member, and mental health consultant on a number of projects and committees in areas of: eating dis/orders, suicide (particularly in youth and LGBTIQA+ populations), psychosis/extreme states, neurodivergence, trauma, iatrogenic harm, trauma-informed treatment, and elimination of restraints and seclusion in psychiatric settings. Rosiel has a particular love of Mad Poetry, mushrooms and fungi, and cephalopods.  

Jersey Cosantino (they/them), a former K-12 educator, is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University, holding certificates of advanced study in women’s and gender studies and disability studies. A Mad studies and trans studies scholar, Jersey employs Mad trans oral history methodologies that center the experiences and subjectivities of Mad, neurodivergent, trans, and gender non-conforming narrators. Challenging sanism, ableism, and transmisia, their research confronts medical model discourses and the pathologizing gaze of the psychiatric industrial complex. Jersey identifies as Mad, neurodivergent, Autistic, queer, trans, and non-binary and is white with education and citizenship privilege. A co-facilitator for SU’s Intergroup Dialogue Program, Jersey holds a master’s in education and graduate certificate in mindfulness studies. They are also the co-editor of the International Mad Studies Journal, a consulting editor for the Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, and a former Trans Lifeline call operator.