This article explores the role and place of mad studies within social work theory, education, and practice. Ultimately, the author argues that transformation in early childhood education and care can take place by reflecting on experiences of mental and emotional distress, and considering poetic writings as starting places for imagining new futurities and a plurality of educator voices and perspectives. The personal and intimate mad autobiographical poetic writing of this article-written by the author-focuses on how personal experience with madness as it pertains to working within pre-service early childhood education and care can challenge norms that govern and regulate madness. This article argues for the importance of autobiographical writing in early childhood education and care, and the necessity of centralizing early childhood educators' subjectivities and histories when addressing-and transforming-issues of equity, inclusion and belonging in early childhood education and care. They explore their own mad autobiographical poetic writing as a queer, non-binary, mad early childhood educator and pre-service early childhood education and care faculty member, and argue that mad poetic writing can methodologically be used as a form of resistance to epistemic injustices and epistemological erasure in early childhood education and care. In this article, the author forwards the importance of mad autobiographical poetic writing to challenge and disrupt epistemic injustice within pre-service early childhood education and care. The paper examines how sanism marginalizes the knowledge(s) of Mad persons and contributes to epistemic injustice, and considers possibilities for advancing social justice using Mad epistemological perspectives. Sanism assumes a pathological view of madness, which can be attributed to what Rimke has termed psychocentrism: the notion that pathologies are rooted in the mind and/or body of the individual, rather than the product of social structures, relations, and problems. Also examined is the problem of sanism, a deeply embedded system of discrimination and oppression, as an underlying component of epistemic injustice.
This paper draws on Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, whereby a person is wronged in his or her capacity as a knower, as a useful framework for interrogating the subjugation of Mad knowledge(s). We argue that this marginalization of firsthand knowledge(s) demands closer critical scrutiny, particularly through the use of critical reflexivitty. The dominance of medicalized "psy" discourses in the West has marginalized alternative perspectives and analyses of madness, resulting in the under-inclusion (or exclusion) from mainstream discourse of the firsthand experiences and perspectives of those who identify as Mad.
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