On the surface, my doctoral dissertation is a literary speculative novel about mental illness, addiction, and prisoner re-entry, but it’s really a story about communal forgiveness as a tool for liberation and the radical framework of disability justice. It’s a literary narrative that imagines the collision of anti-psychiatrists, psychiatric survivors and the Black Panthers. It’s a creative dissertation that asks the question, what does it take to be forgiven? What does it take to receive care when you have done harm?

My creative dissertation tells the story of Black Panther Party activism and radical mental healthcare from the perspective of a sentient halfway house in mid-twentieth century Chicago. The building tells the story of its life from the late 1950s to the early 1990s as it is burning down in a fire set by a mysterious arsonist. My dissertation will contribute to the speculative fiction genre by merging historical research with speculative storytelling, exploring new possibilities for mental healthcare systems within a radically just, decolonized future. By integrating historical and creative perspectives on mental healthcare activism and mad studies, the project aims to promote new understandings of disability justice, while honoring the legacy of past movements like the Black Panther Party’s health programs.

For this conference, I plan to provide a live reading from this literary speculative novel as well as discuss how this new work is contributing to Disability Studies as well as the emerging fields of Mad Studies and Futurisms, a contemporary sub-genre of SFF which was recently named by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isaiah Lavender and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay as a new form of science fiction which utilizes decolonial worldbuilding. By operating in a speculative mode, my dissertation offers a critique of the medical-industrial complex while examining the intersections of the psychiatric survivors movement and the Fred Hampton-era of the Black Panther Party.

As a literary scholar, I am interested in the radical possibilities of utilizing a disability justice framework to formulate new conceptions of providing care to people who are experiencing mental health crises. I am writing this dissertation as a radical response to the human dilemma of how to provide care for people with psychiatric disabilities without increasing harm. As a black woman who lives with a psychiatric disability, I am writing this work to inform the public of the impact of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, to contribute a more nuanced account of the lived experience of psychiatric disability in the American literary canon and to shape a new world of interdisciplinary thought pertaining to the cultural production of people with psychiatric disabilities within the field of Futurism.

My creative dissertation asks, what would the future look like if we centered people with psychiatric disabilities? I call my dissertation the youngest cousin to join the family in the emerging sub-field of Futurisms: Mad Futurism, a disability justice framework of science fiction and fantasy narratives that center communities who have psychiatric disabilities.