Othering, representation, “the community”, a thread. Since yesterday I have been quite preoccupied with the logic of statements like “someone who can work full time, work as a researcher etc. cannot possibly represent/is too unlike folks with ‘real’ SMI” 1/x

What work do such statements perform? All of us researchers are most likely painfully aware of differences in privilege, class, educational access when we consider those working in academia vs unemployed; bracketing that, so much else gets performed and enacted here 2

1. Intellectual ableism: the operative logic depends on an identity between “SMI” and the inability to engage in sustained intellectual work; 2. temporal fixation: ppl don’t actually “recover” or if they do can no longer “represent” their own past 3

3. As I think @DianaRose160 would say, there is a deeply individualizing logic at play as well—experience/perspective as individual rather than collective, and not just fixed in time but individual time 4

4. Similarly, collective knowledges, “subjugated knowledges” per Foucault, are constitutively excluded; the individual brings their own experience only 5

5. Othering—“SMI” is situated as always other to established systems of power-knowledge, knowledge generation and therefore epistemic authority; 6. Disempowerment is on some level then rendered natural, expectable, logical 6

7. And then of course the way this positions the individual making the “not representative” argument & their assumed epistemic authority wrt knowing what “others” have/haven’t experienced, what is/isn’t “authentic”; almost a kind of omniscience 7

8. Confusion/conflation of particular conditions/experiences with poverty, lack of access to education, disadvantage in deeply over-simplified ways that rather than unpacking the complex relations between these things, reduce them to a kind of black box of deficiency 8