School of Social and Political Science

Description

In this talk, we examine how racism, colonialism, and imperialism structure psychiatry and shape the forms of violence enacted against mad people. The inseparability of madness from histories and ongoing systems of racial and colonial violence is centered, in considering the responsibilities of Mad Studies in confronting these conditions.

Venue: Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillian Building, 15a George Square

Please ensure you indicate whether you will be attending in-person or online. For those attending online, a Teams link will be shared upon registration.

Date: Monday November 16th, 2026

Time: 4:00 – 6:00 pm

Organised by:

Social Work Subject area

Global Mental Health Collaborative

Speakers 

Idil Abdillahi is an Associate Professor in the School of Disability Studies, cross-appointed to the School of Social Work at Toronto Metropolitan University. Broadly, her work focuses on Black life, livability, carcerality, and refusal. She is the author or co-author of several texts, including Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty, & the Violence of Social Assistance (2022) and BlackLife: Post BLM and The Struggle for Freedom (2019). 

B. A. LeFrançois is a poet and a University Research Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Their research and scholarship focuses on the psychiatrization of children, mad community praxes, the ethics of care including care work within research as well as anarchist/abolitionist prefigurative politics. Bren has been engaging in critical pedagogy from mad studies and critical mental health perspectives for the past 30 years and has published widely on these and related topics.