surviving success, reconciling resilience: a critical analysis of the appearance of student

280 Pages·2012·1.34 MB·English

SURVIVING SUCCESS, RECONCILING RESILIENCE:
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE APPEARANCE OF STUDENT ‘MENTAL LIFE’
AT ONE CANADIAN UNIVERSITY
by
Catherine (Katie) Muriel Aubrecht
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto

Copyright by Catherine (Katie) Muriel Aubrecht (2012)
SURVIVING SUCCESS, RECONCILING RESILIENCE:
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE APPEARANCE OF STUDENT ‘MENTAL LIFE’
AT ONE CANADIAN UNIVERSITY

Doctor of Philosophy
Catherine (Katie) Muriel Aubrecht
Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
University of Toronto
2012

ABSTRACT

This dissertation addresses the university student as a figure of mental health and
illness. Drawing on the methods and theories of disability studies, interpretive sociology,
critical, feminist and queer theory, as well as hermeneutically oriented phenomenology,
my work explores the social production of this student figure or type – variously depicted
as ‘ invisible’, ‘maladjusted’, ‘stressed’, ‘difficult’, sensitive’, ‘resilient’, ‘narcissistic’,
and extraordinarily ‘ordinary’. This figure is addressed as a means of revealing
contradictory understandings of the relationship between success and survival, as this
relationship appears in the ordinary daily life of the University of Toronto, Ontario,
Canada. The social and historical significance of the contemporary University’s Student
Life Programs and Services is analyzed with a view to reveal the Western cultural values
and practices which organize consciousness of success as a necessary condition of
contemporary existence. Special attention is paid to the cultural production of knowledge
concerning university student ‘mental life’, the appearance of which is located at the
interstices of colonialism, global health policy, institutional ‘best practices’, cultural
mores and folkways, and embodied experiences. I dwell with this appearance as an
occasion to engage the materiality of Western mythologies of resilience, and with them
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the meaning of human agency under neoliberal governance. This engagement examines
the productive power of the disciplinary and institutionalized ‘language of mental illness’
through a genealogy of the University of Toronto, a textual analyses of the University’s
Student Life Programs and Services literature, and a discursive analysis of open-ended
interviews with student services representatives which seeks both to understand and
transgress conventional interpretations of the structure of Student Life. I demonstrate how
University presentations of student bodies, minds and senses perceived to be lacking in
‘ordinary order’, can be reconceived as sites to reflect on the paramount presence of
psychiatric knowledge in interpretations and responses to embodied difference within the
university setting. Overall, this dissertation seeks to disrupt unexamined relations to the
meaning of student types; and in the process, display how normative relations to the
student as a figure of mental health and illness needs is currently and historically
organized and socially achieved.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all of those who have guided me along the way. This
dissertation has been shaped by the generosity and mentorship of so many incredible
people. First and foremost, I need to acknowledge the support of my family without
whom none of this would have been possible. My husband and best friend, Corey
Fougere, has seen me through this work, providing companionship and a reserve of
strength. I am eternally grateful to my mother Catherine Macdonald and sisters
Alexandra Aubrecht and Christina Aubrecht, who invited conversation concerning my
research, offered insight and invaluable feedback and countless occasions to develop my
ideas and approach.
I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto (UT) for her encouragement and
mentorship. Tanya’s enthusiasm for thinking with cultural depictions of difference as
space of questions and her dedicated commitment to theorizing the social, especially as it
appears within the university context, has inspired this analysis. I would not be where I
am today without the care that Tanya has shown me as a supervisor and my gratitude to
her extends well beyond the dissertation. Tanya’s work in interpretive social theory and
phenomenology has profoundly shaped my horizon of possibilities, transforming the way
I relate to the world and the way I want to be in and with the world. I am similarly
indebted to Dr. Rod Michalko, New College and OISE/UT. A longtime student of Rod’s,
in his lectures I was moved to a desire to listen with disability as a difference that, as he
says, makes a difference, and listen towards alterity. With Rod’s guidance I learned the
importance of patience in analysis, and that much can be gained from learning to ‘slow
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down’ and ‘hang around’ a while, staying with the ideas and images that organize how
we know and feel the ways we do. My gratitude to Tanya and Rod reaches back 12 years.
In undergraduate Sociology courses at St. Francis Xavier University in my hometown of
Antigonish, Nova Scotia, they created spaces to dwell with the transformative
possibilities of imaginative relations to where and when and how we always already are,
as a means of entering into dialogue with the enigmatic character of ordinary everyday
life.
My committee member and professor, Dr. Kari Dehli, is another person who has
fundamentally shaped the form and direction of this dissertation through her teaching,
thoughtful dialogue, imaginative instruction and openness to the transformative power of
playful and engaged relations to theoretical constructs. My decisions to conduct a
genealogy of the University of Toronto and to examine processes of governmentality and
neoliberalism were born out of conversations with her. I am grateful to Dr. Roy Moodley
for joining the committee and reading the dissertation. Chapters 5 and 6 were influenced
by a talk he gave at the International Disability Studies Summer Institute in 2011, in
which he analyzed and contested the normative grammar of Westernized ways of
knowing. I want to thank Dr. Bill Hughes for agreeing to be the external and for
providing his helpful feedback. More importantly, I want to thank him and Kevin
Paterson for demonstrating that it is not only possible to think with disability studies,
sociology and phenomenology, it is really quite exciting. My supervisor, committee
members and external have served as exemplary role models. While this dissertation
takes up conceptual models and roles as a social phenomenon in need of question and a
‘closer look’, this is not done to discount the meaningfulness of either models or roles.
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This work is, rather, an appeal to understanding their centrality in the sensible appearance
of a meaningful life.
I am grateful to the participants in the study and the professional staff of the
University of Toronto Student Life Programs and Services. Everyone I spoke with was so
helpful, collecting preliminary information, recruitment and accessing public resources. I
am also very grateful to the librarians at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the
University of Toronto and the libraries at Dalhousie University for their kind and careful
assistance. A version of Chapter 2 has been published in The Review of Disability
Studies: An International Journal under the title, “Disability Studies and the Language of
Mental Illness” (Aubrecht, 2012), and I am thankful for the journal’s support and for
providing copyright permission.
I feel that it is important to also thank the various employers which I have had
throughout this process. I was given time and space to pursue scholarly activities, as well
as mentorship and training which provoked new questions from disperse perspectives,
and which also contributed to my thinking and writing. Dr. Katherine Harman, Faculty of
Health Professions, Dalhousie University, appeared in my life at precisely the right
moment. I learned so much about university administration and health profession
educational program coordination from Katherine, and my work with her played a
significant role in my relations to university governance. Pamela Fancey and Dr. Janice
Keefe of the Nova Scotia Centre on Aging, Mount Saint Vincent University, are two
others from which I have learned a great deal about the cultural nuances that animate and
inform contemporary social policy and the importance of community-oriented scholarly
work. My supervisor, committee members and employers have served as exemplary role
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models. While this dissertation takes up conceptual models and student roles as a social
phenomenon in need of question and a ‘closer look’, this is not done to discount the
meaningfulness of either models or roles. This work is, rather, an appeal to understanding
their centrality in the sensible appearance of a meaningful life.
I am also grateful to Dr. George Dei, OISE/UT, for teaching me the necessity of
situated historical analyses of colonial institutions, such as the university, and challenging
me to confront my privilege and the engage the symbolic and material effects of a ‘taking
responsibility for’ which does not recognize itself as implicated within contemporary
forms of colonial governance and expansion. I have so much respect for my colleagues in
the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. Eliza
Chandler, Anne Mcguire and Jijian Voronka have been steadfast and dear friends. Their
friendship offered a sense of sanctuary as I completed this dissertation from off-campus.
Their continued communication with me, and the spirit of welcome with which they
always greeted my returns gave me a sense of community as something which both
exceeds and disrupts reductive understandings of place and presence. I would also like to
thank Chris Chapman for our brief but so very helpful discussions about writing and
research, as well as Shaista Patel, Patty Douglas, Carrie Cox de los Santos, Jan
MacDougall, Isaac Stein, Devi Dee Mucina, Energy Manyino and Samantha Walsh.
These friends and their words were all with me as I wrote this dissertation.
Thanks also to the friends who have helped me along the way, and who I may not
have shared classes with but most certainly shared in many life lessons. I am particularly
thankful for Letitia MacDonald, Alison Girroir, Julia Chisholm, Janice Deon, Julia
MacPherson, Jodi Cunningham and Michelle Vassallo, all of whom opened their homes
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and hearts to me without hesitance. They helped me to recognize that I could do this
work when I had convinced myself otherwise. Thanks also to my mother-in-law, Theresa
Fougere, who has been so kind and supportive throughout the process. I am also indebted
to my father-in-law Damian Fougere and his partner Miriam Sampson for their
generosity. I owe a special gratitude to Damian for asking me when I was ever going to
finish! This rather ordinary question did not only make me want to give an answer. It also
provoked a desire to dwell with the phenomenal significance of reflecting on the meaning
of completion, and that which lies beyond. Lastly, my thanks go out to the many thinkers
this dissertation draws on. All of whom were students once, and whose work I had come
to imagine as quite possibly influenced by a ‘university experience’.
Funding for this research was generously provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier
Canada Graduate Scholarship (2007-2010).

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DEDICATION

To my mother, whose courage inspires me, my father and grandmother, whose spirits
guide me, my partner, whose commitment moves me, sisters, whose love grounds me,
colleagues, whose friendship compels me, and professors, whose poetry transforms me.
All of you have anchored the meaning of being and doing student in a love of the world.
This dissertation is for you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract...........................................................................................................................ii-iii
Acknowledgements......................................................................................................iv-viii
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………..ix
Contents……………………………………………………………………...…………x-xii
List of Figures....................................................................................................................xiii

Chapter 1. Introduction: Surviving Success, Reconciling Resilience................................. 1
Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1
The Interlocutors... Theory & Method ............................................................................ 2
A Word on Language .................................................................................................... 10
Responsible Speech ....................................................................................................... 12
Internal Disruptions ....................................................................................................... 17
The Critical Limits of Educational ‘Models’ ................................................................ 20
Learning to Cope (Make Do) ........................................................................................ 23
Regarding Marginality .................................................................................................. 36

Chapter 2. Disability Studies and Psychiatric Knowledge ............................................... 88
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 41
The ‘New’ Disability Studies and Its Methodological Approach ................................. 44
A Phenomenology of Survival ...................................................................................... 49
Disability Studies and Psychiatric Survivors .............................................................. 104
Integration and Invisibility ............................................................................................ 55
Transient Interpretations and Identity Shifts ................................................................. 56
Making the Language of Mental Illness ‘Worldly’ ....................................................... 62
Disability Identity and Impairment ............................................................................... 67
There’s No Such Thing as Mental Illness ..................................................................... 73
A Return to the Question of “What”, Makes Us Different ........................................... 79
Making Issues of Mental Illness Matter Differently ..................................................... 82
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