A fight worth remembering: sharing archival materials in interviews to support recall of ex-mental patient activism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This institutional ethnographic (IE) study of a little-known Ontario-based mad history recounts how, in the 1980s and 1990s, ex-mental patients established a number of social enterprises (also known as consumer/survivor businesses), secured government funding and through these sites, got politically active around issues that impacted their lives. This research poses critical sociological questions about the circulation of activist knowledge-practices and the formation of these businesses as sites of community organizing. Methodologically, IE offers an approach through which I began from the experiences of ex-mental patients while aiming to explore how their activist practices are coordinated trans-locally. By interviewing 42 people who were involved in or supported consumer/survivor businesses and by assembling and digitizing materials from their personal collections, archival collections and the businesses themselves, this work brings into view the central role that consumer/survivor business played in mad people's activism locally. Formulated at the intersection of mad studies, social movement studies, feminist theories and sociology of knowledge, this study drew on IE interviews using archival data in innovative ways. Pointing to concrete examples, I put forward numerous benefits to using archival materials in interviews to aid participants in recalling events from the not-so-recent past. Arguably, engaging archival materials during interviews can enhance accessibility for populations who are older, experience memory issues, have a history of psychiatric interventions, or for anyone who may benefit from material prompts to resituate them to a particular time and space. Looking through materials alongside participants may serve to initiate discussion and prompt recall, evoking participants' memories of past events and the meaning they attribute to these, in turn producing richer stories. Doing so may help to ensure key informants are able to make meaningful contributions to sociological research on histories of activism. Talking to participants about archival material can help researchers to make sense of those materials, their connections and sequencing. Additionally, audio and visual materials may bring the contributions of community members who are no longer with us back into dialogue with those who are.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".