Our Consumer Place

Forum
Beyond Sensible: Injecting new
ideas into the consumer conversation
When: Friday 19 September 2014
Time: 9.30 Registration and Start on time at 10am (Finish at 4.30pm)
Free Event - Lunch provided by Our Consumer Place
Venue: William Angliss (Corner LaTrobe and Kings Street Melbourne, Level 5)
This forum is special. We have made a space to speak authoritatively as well as quietly and tentatively; questioning taken
for granted assumptions and searching for new ideas about what it is to be the social underdog.
The speakers contribute experience, tested authority and a shared conviction that bringing that which is hidden to the
surface, enhances our capacity to relate to each other respectfully and with integrity.
Why is it that so many of our collective endeavours
living in community, organising resistance to unwanted
impositions, collaboration and cooperation encounter
so many difculties? Could it be that our ways of living are
actually making us sick? How can we start to think, live and
engage beyond the enclosure of our individual selves?
Ann Tullgren: Risk Identities and the
construction of the other: Responsibility as the
new recovery?
Ann Tullgren is a consumer, thinker and writer from Hobart
in Tasmania.
Ann argues that concepts of risk and personal responsibility
dominate mental health policy and practice and yet they are
not value neutral, evidence-based constructs. They reect
conservative political, economic and cultural views
in contemporary society.
Panel Discussion: Consumer Perspective:
challenging the obvious
With Sandy Watson, Flick Grey, Jacques Boulet and Ann
Tullgren.
BOOK Online Now:
www.ourcommunity.com.au/beyondsensible
(places restricted so book early)
Speakers
Flick Grey: Benevolent othering
Flick Grey is a consumer academic and freelance consultant
and trainer, currently employed at the University of
Melbourne and RMIT.
Flick will share her PhD research on otherness (including
people with mental illness) looking at apparently positive
endeavours like anti-stigma campaigns or the recovery
discourse. She argues that these representations reinforce
existing hierarchical power relations, speak for consumers/
others and offer only conditional acceptance at best.
Sandy Watson: Consumer rights and the Smoke
and Mirrors Carrousel
Worldview Disruption Activist; Consumer Consultant/
Educator
Consumers have more rights than at any time in history,
but this doesnt necessarily equate to any signicant
improvement in rights awareness, rights-based practices,
or consumer empowerment. It may just mean that services
and governments are more adept at concealing or minim-
ising rights they dont want consumers to know they have.
Jacques Boulet: The Relational Base of
Community Activism
Jacques has lived and worked across ve continents
and has been an academic for about 25 years; he has
been involved with the Borderlands Cooperative since its
inception in 1997.
RESOURCE CENTRE FOR MENTAL HEALTH CONSUMERS
Our Consumer Place
acknowledges the support of
the Victorian Government
Our Consumer Place is
auspiced by Our Community
Our Consumer Place is Australias mental health
resource centre run entirely by people diagnosed with
mental illness
RESOURCE CENTRE FOR MENTAL HEALTH CONSUMERS