Tim Barlott is Assistant Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Alberta, Canada, and Adjunct Fellow and Co-Director of SocioHealthLab at The University of Queensland, Australia. He is interested in participatory, community-based, and applied postqualitative approaches to health research, particularly with psychiatrised people. Jenny Setchell is Senior Research Fellow in physiotherapy at The University of Queensland, Australia and founder of SocioHealthLab, an interdisciplinary collective pursing social transformation in healthcare through sociocultural research. Jenny enjoys using postqualitative and creative research approaches and has also been an acrobat and a human rights worker.
This is an exceptionally well written book. The authors successfully take an obtuse line of theoretical inquiry from Deleuze and Guattari, and artfully make it accessible and engaging. They carefully avoid rehashing the now cliched elements of this theory, in favour of more direct and grounded explanation. Specifically, the authors takes readers deep into relationships with eight participants - produced through a time-consuming process of relationship-building developed over several encounters - to clearly demonstrate the re-imaginative benefits of their theory-data entanglement. Rebecca Olson, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia In this powerful book, Barlott and Setchell demand we radically rethink the nature of friendship and (health)care. To reframe friendship through posthuman philosophy is to explore how our very being is made and remade in tiny moments of everyday life. Barlott and Setchell trace the genesis and unfolding of four such friendships, how they support, challenge, and resist dominant frameworks of mental health service. Health researchers, whether we like it or not, are part of this process. If we wish to affirm life in freely-given relationships, this book is the place to start. Thomas Abrams, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Queen's University, Canada