Mad Together in Technogenic Times

Abstract

This dissertation describes concerns associated with the technologization of madness and instances when people with diverse mental states engage with technology to participate in the more-than-human world. Drawing from field notes, visual data, and interviews I collected in a multi-sited ethnography, I argue that technology can shape an individual’s environ(mental) niche, bring people together, and create a sense of solidarity through sharing lived experiences within posthuman emotional ecologies. Paradoxically, such tools are unstable themselves: they can create volatile spaces in which people feel further alienated and fragmented as their “symptoms” of mental illness are performed publicly. Noting the many iterations of The Icarus Project in digital and analog spheres and my engagements with those involved, I also articulate the internal logics and contradictions within neoliberal forces that push individuals within the organization to perform particular economic rationalities in preparation for the seemingly inevitable collapse of their own mental states and of the group’s functioning as a whole. Finally, I ask how we might begin to acknowledge the complexities of madness and loss in ways that do not further reify heroic—yet admittedly problematic—narratives of risk and resilience.