Season 2 Episode 3: Getting Beyond Ourselves with Erica Fletcher

Join us for an intimate and far reaching conversation with scholar, educator, and media producer Erica Hua Fletcher where we discuss contemporary mental health social movements, community health and healing, identity politics, and the rise of Mad Studies. 

Topics we cover include:

  • The limits of terms like “madness” and “mental health”
  • The many useful lessons learned from researching The Icarus Project and other forms of peer support
  • The multiple and complex gifts and traps of embracing identity politics 
  • The growth of the Mad Studies field in the academy and beyond
  • Critical psychiatry and how public mental health care can be radically transformed

About Erica:

Erica is a scholar, educator, and media producer based in Los Angeles, California (Tongva land). She currently serves as a co-president of the Anthropology and Mental Health Interest Group, in association with the American Anthropological Association's Society for Medical Anthropology; and this fall, she is starting a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, where she will be doing research on issues related to veterans recovery and resilience. Erica writes about contemporary mental health social movements, community health and healing, and carework; her scholarship and course offerings span the health humanities, social medicine, mad studies, and social work. She has taught at four public universities, most recently at the University of California at Irvine. 

Find Erica online:

  • On the web: https://ericahua.weebly.com/
  • On Social Media: Instagram @erica.hua 

Links to relevant resources:

Links to So Many Wings’ social media and website

Episode 1: Queer Nature

In this episode, Jacks and Sascha interview Pınar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd from Queer Nature. We discuss everything from mythological remediation, challenging the colonial psychopharmaceutical system, and experiencing parallel realities to mystery as a primary need, ecological ancestral co-regulation, and that true identity can only be found in the collective. It’s a really exciting interview!

Full transcript available here.

About Queer Nature: Queer Nature is an education and social sculpture project that actively dreams into decolonially-informed queer ‘ancestral futurism’ through mentorship in place-based skills with awareness of post-industrial/globalized/ecocidal contexts. Place-based skills include naturalist studies, handcrafts, “survival skills,” and recognition of colonial and indigenous histories of land, and are framed in a container that emphasizes deep listening and relationship building with living and non-living earth systems. Queer Nature designs and facilitates nature-based workshops and multi-day immersions intended to be financially, emotionally, and physically accessible to LGBTQ2+ people and QTBIPOCs. We carry the story and hope that these spaces create resilient narratives of belonging for folks who have often been made to feel by systems of oppression that they biologically, socially, or culturally don’t belong.

Bios of featured interviewees

PINAR (THEY/THEM)

Pınar is an Indigenous futurist, mentor, consultant and eco-philosopher; co-founder of Queer Nature, an “organism” stewarding earth-based queer community through ancestral skills, interspecies solidarity and rites of passage. Enchanted by the liminal, Pınar is a neurodivergent enby with Wanka Quechua, Turkish and Chinese lineages. As a QTIBIPOC outdoor catalyst, their inspiration is envisioning decolonially-informed queer ancestral-futurism through interspecies accountability and the remediation of human exceptionalism in the Chthulucene. Their relationship with queerness, hybridity, neurodivergence, indigeneity and belonging guided their work in developing Queer Ecopsychology with a somatic and depth approach through a decolonial lens. As a survival skills mentor, one of their core missions is to uplift and amplify the brilliant “survival skills” that BIPOC, LGBTQ2SIA+ and other intersectional systemically targeted populations already have in their resilient bodies and stories of survivance. They are a member of Diversify Outdoors coalition. Follow their work on IG via @queerquechua + @queernature

SO (THEY/THEM)

Sophia ("So") Sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them) is a white queer Greek-American who grew up in the northern hardwood forests of Alnobak territory (central Vermont). So is a nature-based educator, wilderness EMT, and writer. So worked as a seasonal shepherd throughout college and considers their life path(s) to be deeply inspired by the resilience and tenderness of cloven-hooved beings, who inspired them to study the earth more closely. In 2015 they founded Queer Nature with their spouse Pinar which offers nature-based programming for LGBTQ2SIA+ people with a focus on nature-connection, place-based skills, and transformative experience through queer and decolonial prisms. The soul of So’s work is animated by studies of identity, place, notions of the sacred, and interspecies relationship within contexts of colonization, globalization, migration, and climate crisis. So holds an MA in Religious Studies from Claremont Graduate University, and has had their writing published in The Wayfarer and Written River. Their special interests are being a spouse to their beloved, wildlife tracking, practicing survival skills, emergency medicine, dogs, and helping preparing their communities for uncertain futures.

Find Queer Nature online:

Queer Nature’s website: https://www.queernature.org/

On Instagram: https://instagram.com/queernature

On Facebook: www.facebook.com/queernature

On Patreon: www.patreon.com/queernature

 

Links to resources  mentioned:

Loam magazine, where their upcoming essay will be published: https://loamlove.com/