Annie Whilby

I am a doctoral researcher exploring Black people's experiences of love, intimacy and desire within the context of 'psychosis' and recovery. My PhD research is a qualitative, interdisciplinary project, underpinned by a phenomenological approach. My work focuses on mental distress and the importance of relationality, as well as challenging colonial and racist legacies within mental health frameworks.

I am a lived experience researcher and have a strong interest in creative methods and radical methodologies. As a spoken word artist outside of academia, it has felt natural to interweave poetic inquiry throughout my work; I create poems from relevant literature to include in my thesis, and utilise poetic analysis as an interpretative method of analysing data.

I am passionate about decolonisation, as well as re-indiginisation (revisiting and returning to Black and Indigenous understandings prior to colonisation). Within my work I consider and challenge racist and colonial legacies within academia, mental health/distress, sexuality, relationships and relationality.