‘It’s complicated’: blending disability and mad studies in the corporatising university

Introduction Let's say you accept the principle that all study of past cultural practice is a contribution to the history of the present. And let's say that you also accept the testimony of your exhausted body that the present is a time of struggle. (Marc Bousquet, 1998) Across their diversity, the contributors to this book address the question of whether and how ‘mental distress’ and disability do/might come together in theory, policy and/or practice. I am pleased to be included in the collection although, at one point, I thought I might have to deliver my text in short hits of email. It was a wry nod at what has been happening to me since I became director of the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University, Toronto. After just three years, the enforced discipline of providing brief, objective and functional communications – pressed by relentless reporting deadlines and compressed into unyielding electronic templates – has eroded my ability to think and write in more fulsome ways; to complicate rather than (over) simplify; to make problematic rather than make nice (Smith, 1987). This chapter is a chance to fight back. In that spirit, I draw eagerly from the politicised word play of the psychiatric survivor activists who surround and inform me: mad; mad-identified; mad-positive. The shock of these terms make you STOP…and say… ‘WHAT?’ And in that interruption, that space of sudden confusion, we can invoke a strand of human experience and history that pre-dates and challenges psychiatric dominance. We can seize an opening into ‘something otherwise’ – something we could call Mad Studies. My task is to think about how madness became an identifiable and substantive part of the curriculum, instructional and student life in disability studies at Ryerson. Within our programme, how or where does madness fit in relation to disability? How do the two exist within the faculty/staff team of the programme itself? Are there tensions in the relationship? And can we talk about them? In the absence of much literature on this topic, I will draw from practice in the school (Miettinen et al, 2009), keenly aware that the broader context for my description is the long downsizing of education in western capitalist nations (Leitch, 2005).

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