about
calanthe, aka rebecca, is an audhd disabled woman from the uk, currently working on a PhD in the medical & health humanities from the university of kent. her neurodivergence and her chronic pain/chronic fatigue have not only radically changed and directed her life, but also formed an incredibly important basis for her career as a researcher.she is a lifelong writer, gamer and roleplayer and delights in stories whether she's telling them or taking them in. she is also an extremely amateur musician with a penchant for writing emo fan songs.
publications
academic publications'madness, control and agency in video games' @ the polyphonybook publicationsthrough the wardrobe - a hybrid creative/critical piece on trauma healing through live-action roleplaying
how to forgive yourself in fifteen years - a poetry chapbook about mental distress
mundane magic - a novel about what it means to be specialnon-academic publicationssometimes @ snapdragon journal (winter, 2016) - poetry
repetition and recovery @ here comes everyone journal (transition edition) - narrative non-fiction
research
thea's research focuses on the lived experience of Madness. her work and interests are primarily situated in autopathography, especially when those narratives deviate from the standard arc of restitution or embrace crip temporalities. she is fond of approaches that challenge the status quo, deviate from traditional scholarship, and work to open access to the academy to the less represented.she works within the Mad studies and psychiatric survivor movements both from an academic and activist perspective to inform and guide her work. she is deeply interested and invested in disability studies, queer studies, gender studies and trans studies, and brings the wisdom from these diverse experiences of marginalised identity to influence her work.her PhD thesis, 'representations of embodied Madness in interactive narrative forms', explores how different media types enable authors to show what living with mental distress is like. it engages with the medical & health humanities and disability studies as well as theories specific to the media types.in may 2023 as part of her thesis work she conducted a survey in the fanfiction community to gather data on fanfiction and mental illness. the data is publicly available via the harvard dataverse.