About

In this episode, I speak with Sarah Redikopp about self-harm and self-mutilation. Sarah is a mad and lived experience activist-academic and PhD candidate in the Graduate Program of Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Sarah’s research uses critical and feminist theory and methods to critique psychiatric knowledges about self-harm. Drawing on insights from mad studies, queer and feminist affect theory, critical and feminist disability studies, and critical race theory, Sarah’s scholarship engages directly with lived experience accounts to co-create relational, intersectional, and contextualized engagements with self-harm and to inform social justice outcomes in “mental health” research. At the heart of Sarah’s work is a commitment to witnessing across difference and intervening into the pathologization of distress to inform social change. Sarah’s work has been published in scholarly, community, and grassroots publishing venues, including Sociology of Health and Illness (2022, 2023) and The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies (2021), Canada Watch (2021), and more. Sarah lives and works as a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.