Are you going mad? If not would you like to, in a culturally empowering manner? Then join MIT’s Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women & Sexuality for its fall course on Graphic Medicine.

Come together with other women exploring feminist pedagogy as we “orient our inquiry of comics in the concepts and practices of disability justice, what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha describes as a movement-building framework that would center the lives, needs, and organizing strategies of disabled queer and trans and/or Black and brown people marginalized from mainstream disability rights organizing’s white-dominated single-issue focus.”

Your spiritual guide will be madness expert Dr. Briana Martino from Simmons University. They practice the politico-therapeutics of mad organizing using comic books to produce a transdisciplinary verbal/visual lexicon.

Key tenets include: 1. resistance to the idea of a “universal patient,” one which defaults to white, cis, hetero, male of European descent, 2. outcomes linked to more inclusive perspectives of medicine, illness, and disability in healthcare scholarship and clinical practice, 3. growing comics’ historical role in cultural and political change.

As we move into a world that feels more and more like the lunatics are running the asylum, GCWS courses like this and others will help even sane students cope with the influx of scholars and co-workers who would have been housed in a very different kind of institution thirty years ago.