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We argue that successful participatory mental health organisations should be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ rather than as the subjective ‘other’ to objective science. With the term ‘alternative objectivity’, we point to collectivisations of experience that are different to biomedical science but are nonetheless forms of objectivity. Taking inspiration from feminist theory, science studies and sociology of culture, we argue that participatory mental health organisations generate their own forms of objectivity through novel modes of collectivising experience. Through two case studies, the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company, we demonstrate how successful participatory organisations can be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ rather than as the subjective other to objective, biomedical science. The Hearing Voices Movement cultivates an ‘activist science’ that generates an alternative objective knowledge through a commitment to experimentation, controlling, testing, recording and sharing experience. Stepping Out distinguishes itself from drama therapy by cultivating an alternative objective culture through its embrace of high production values, material culture, aesthetic standards and critical review processes. A crucial aspect of participatory practice is overcoming alienation, enabling people to get outside of themselves, encounter material worlds and join forces with others.

This experimental photo essay responds to a growing foreboding that the future has been occupied, colonized, or destroyed. It is a methodological experiment with attunement and futurity, aiming not to reattune to authentic forms of temporality or to rediscover lost forms of imagination and memory, but to make creative use of our temporal misattunements and disconnections. Drawing on research in a postindustrial neighbourhood of Cardiff, the essay dwells on the new temporalities that might emerge from an inertia of time.

We live in times of social, mental and environmental crisis. Can we learn to listen better to voices that escape the usual registers of meaning? Can doing so help us address these multiple ecological crises? The contributions to this book search for more sustainable, creative, and empowering relationships with the non-human and more-than-human world. The extensively illustrated collection of essays, stories, songs, drawings, and colour photographs explores creative ways of listening with the materials, energies and vitality of non-human life. Drawing on poetry, political activism, art, and academic research, the essays search for new ways of inhabiting a damaged world.

A remarkable feature of the Occupy movement has been the widespread calls for protesters to ‘Occupy the Future’, reclaiming time as a form of commons: something that is collectively practised, shared, and distributed. In one striking poster (Figure 7.1), a faceless businessman, coloured in red and with an angel’s halo and a devil’s tail, walks towards a little girl holding a large banner saying ‘Occupy your future’. The girl stands in front of a crowd of protesters, and stands firm on the bottom edge of the image. The businessman, by contrast, despite his size, is lost in the middle of the image, anchorless in a sea of grey. The little girl, through her age and gender, embodies conventions of purity and reproductive futurity; the crowd behind her offer the strength to overcome the satanic corporate world. The image articulates a theological temporality of innocence, salvation, and fulfilment.