Feb 28, 2024 (Zoom): Cross-Pollinations

Join the League of Canadian Poets, the Health Arts Research Centre, and the Canadian Association for Health Humanities for the next iteration of the Cross-Pollinations Virtual Rounds Series.

February 28, 2024 | 3pm PT/6pm ET

** Please be aware that this event will include discussion of self-harm, suicidality, sexual assault, psychiatric violence, and madness. Please feel free to attend with video off, step away as needed, or leave the event early if needed. **

The Wednesday, Feb 28 Cross-Pollinations event is focused on the theme of self-harm through critical mad and disability frameworks. We will be joined by poet Rob Colgate and PhD student Sarah Redikopp. Rob, a disabled bakla writer and researcher, will be presenting on their poetic explorations of self-harm in relation to suicidality, disability/madness, and sexual assault. Sarah, a researcher and writer, will present part of her doctoral dissertation that challenges self-harm as a psychiatric problem, especially in relation to the psychiatric diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.
Rob Colgate

Rob Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright from Evanston, IL. His work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast, and New England Review, among others, and has received support from MacDowell, Fulbright, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. He is the author of MY LOVE IS WATER, a verse drama forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse, and FEEBLE, winner of the Poetry Online Chapbook Series Fellowship. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability, and assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Journal.

Sarah Redikopp

Sarah Redikopp (she/her) is a mad researcher and writer whose work explores understandings of – and responses to – self-harm in contemporary western contexts. Redikopp’s doctoral research mobilizes critical narrative and cultural analysis to trouble the production of self-harm as a psychiatric problem, and to co-articulate counterhegemonic ways of knowing, speaking, and engaging with self-harm through mad and feminist disability frameworks. Redikopp’s work has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as Studies in Social JusticeSociology of Health and IllnessCanadian Journal of Disability Studies, and Word and Text. Redikopp is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University.

Recordings from past events can be viewed on YouTube.