Mad Mapping: A Guide to Creating an Emotional Safety Plan
Live transcription is available here. ASL will be provided.
Mad Mapping Handout available here: https://bit.ly/madmapping-handout
How do mad, disabled, and neurodivergent people center our liberation as we survive and organize? Emotional Safety Plans (Mad Maps) are documents we create that help us to navigate our emotional terrains, particularly as they relate to issues like oppression and trauma. In Fireweed Collective’s Mad Mapping workshop, we will explore anti-oppressive approaches to emotional wellbeing, as well as build strategies for coping with and transforming individual struggles, especially in the larger context of social injustice. Join us as we learn about emotional safety planning and explore what we need to feel supported in our relationships and communities.
This workshop will take place from 6–8 p.m. ET.
Conference Detail
The 47th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference organized by BCRW is entitled “Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing.” The conference will be virtual and sessions will take place over a period of weeks from February to April, 2022.
This conference will explore experiences of madness, disability, survival, and refusal through the frameworks of mad studies, disability justice, and artistic practice. Scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners will interrogate structures of medicalization and institutionalization, engaging in dialogue about the entanglement of psy-disciplines with colonial and nation-building projects predicated on scientific racism, misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, and eugenics. We ask how structural violence has both created maddening conditions and established the terms by which survivors are pathologized, criminalized and alienated.
Among the questions we want to explore are those posed by conference panelist Camille Robcis in her intellectual history of institutional psychotherapy, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (2021), specifically how movements that have attempted to decolonize and otherwise contest the practices of psychiatry can provide us with frameworks to understand our own positioning vis-à-vis “the permanence of extreme-right movements, fascisms real and ‘in our heads,’ still spreading and gaining force throughout the world.” We take inspiration as well from our Fall 2021 event with La Marr Jurelle Bruce, whose critical discourse about madness encompasses unruliness, radical creativity, and rage in the face of systems that have used the concept of Blackness as disability to foreclose the possibilities of Black freedom. Our conference dialogues will also engage calls for intersectional approaches to abolition and decarceralization address disability and madness, and the imperative to center the experiences of indigenous and Palestinian people resisting psychic oppression while living under occupation.
The impetus for this conference comes as we collectively persist while a virus has exposed structural violence and inadequacy of profit-based systems of care, and we are also confronted with increased ecological fragility. We are now understandably asking questions about the shakiness of human experience, and how to reckon with what might be called “unlivable states of mind.” War, ecological destruction, land dispossession, occupation and policing, precarious access to shelter, and confinement in a total institution are among the conditions that are maddening, and yet upheld by powerful schemas that place value on profit, property, and hierarchy over collective wellbeing.
Gathering together, we explore potential modes of healing. Like seeds we plant without knowing which will root, we pursue collectivity and creativity in order to keep living.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all.
The event will stream on BCRW’s YouTube Channel. RSVP to receive a link to the livestream closer to the date of the event.
About the Speakers
Antoinette Chen-See (She/They) is a multidisciplinary organizer, builder, and community weaver for the people. From coordinating and throwing qtpoc benefit parties with the Ships in the Night Collective for 8 years, to practicing in co-counseling and support team work for over 10 years, Antoinette’s passions include bringing people together in loving, healing and fantastic ways. As a Queer Jamaican American, Antoinette’s work is guided by the desire to create communities that move us closer to healing and liberation.
Lilac Vylette Maldonado (she/they) is a community organizer and culture worker who identifies as a sick & disabled, neurodivergent, Two-Spirit, Chicanx femme. She has been actively organizing since 2009 around many intersectional social justice issues such as racial justice, gender justice, disability justice, LGBTQIA+ issues, and body autonomy and acceptance. They are an avid zinester who has written and created artwork for various academic and social justice themed DIY booklets. She is a co-founding member of and logistics coordinator for the Los Angeles Spoonie Collective, a grassroots disability justice group connecting disabled activists and artists to community organizing and education opportunities.
Image Detail
Image credit: Jess X. Snow, “A Daughter Migrates to Mother Earth” (2021)