Mad Ecopoetics as Resistance: Restor[y]ing Multispecies Relationships through a Borderline-Centred Art Practice

Research output: Contribution to conferenceAbstract

Abstract

This presentation emerges from my doctoral research and develops a borderline-centred creative practice as both scholarly enquiry and act of resistance to sanist and anthropocentric discourse. I develop this from my own experience as someone diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

Clinically defined by emotional intensity and unstable identity, BPD is here reframed as an embodied awareness of relational entanglement — the existential experience of borderlines expose the porous boundaries of the individual, and the co-constitutive nature of identity.

My research reclaims borderline madness as ecological sensibility. Rooted in Mad Studies, feminist theory, and multispecies philosophy, my research repositions borderline epistemologies as those which might provide insights into how identity is co-constituted not only of human others, but non-human others also.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 6 Nov 2025
EventEveryday Resistance:: Thinking, making and living in the material world - University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom
Duration: 6 Nov 20257 Nov 2025
https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/cappe/2025/10/08/everyday-resistance-thinking-making-and-living-in-the-material-world/

Conference

ConferenceEveryday Resistance:
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityBrighton
Period6/11/257/11/25
OtherWhat does resistance mean? How can individuals and communities resist hegemonic social orders? Can resistance occur without new forms of subjugation, transgression without the (re)institution of new norms (Michel Foucault, 1977; Ephraim Das Janssen, 2017)? Does resistance ever have an end goal? These questions are repeated in the fields of philosophy, political theory, history and beyond.

This two-day conference aims to centre resistance as it is already lived and embodied, including in practices that do not appear immediately “political”, and through materials and forms of making historically subjugated (Kirsty Robertson, 2011; Roszika Parker, 1984).

Co-organised by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics and the Design Activism research strand of the Centre for Design History, this interdisciplinary encounter aims to join theoretical research and historical inquiry. Together, we will explore practical and material ways by which people resist hegemonic orders, remake social structures, and challenge other oppressive systems.
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