The Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies is proud to announce that PhD candidate Alisha Grech has been awarded the 2025 Burstow Scholarship for Studies in Activism from the Margins. This prestigious $15,000 scholarship recognizes Alisha’s outstanding academic merit and her transformative research in radical mad perspectives and mad studies. We spoke with Alisha about her work, her inspirations, and her vision for the future of the field.
Q&A with Alisha Grech
What were you doing and how did you feel when you found out you had received the Burstow Scholarship? What does receiving this award mean to you personally and professionally?
I was at home with my two pugs (shout out to Leia and Mando) when the email came through. I had to reread it several times before it really sank in. It’s an enormous honour. Personally, it feels deeply affirming to have this kind of recognition for research that centres neurodivergence, disability justice and abolitionist feminism. Professionally, it affirms that work grounded in disability justice and feminist activism is not only valid but urgently needed in academic spaces.
Can you tell us about your current research and how it engages with radical mad perspectives or mad studies?
My dissertation examines how systems of policing in the United States criminalize those who fall outside of what I theorize as default gender performativity—a social standard grounded in whiteness, neurotypicality, cisnormativity, heterosexuality, and emotional regulation. Drawing from mad studies, abolitionist feminism, and performance theory, my work traces how state violence functions as a response to perceived illegibility—particularly when someone’s race, gender, and mental state mark them as non-compliant.
What inspired you to pursue this area of study?
This work is both intellectual and personal. Outside of the presence of neurodivergence in my personal life, I’ve worked with campaigns like #SayHerName and spent years in community education spaces focused on gender-based violence. These experiences—combined with my own perspective as someone who is neurodivergent—made clear to me how often madness and mental health are treated as apolitical, when in fact, they’re deeply shaped by intersectional forces.
How does your work challenge or expand existing narratives in the field of mad studies?
Mad studies has made powerful interventions into psychiatry and sanism, but many foundational texts are still grounded in whiteness. My work insists on an intersectional mad studies—one that takes seriously how race, gender, and state violence structure who is seen as dangerous, disordered, or disposable. I bring policing into the centre of analysis, arguing that madness is not only socially constructed but also materially punished.
Are there particular communities, movements, or thinkers that have influenced your work?
My thinking is deeply indebted to the work of the African American Policy Forum and the #SayHerName campaign, as well as to scholars and artists Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Nona Faustine, Aleshea Harris, Theri A. Pickens, Robyn Maynard, Liat Ben-Moshe, Jaklin Romine, Dorothy Roberts, and many more. I also owe a great deal to many grassroots organizations and organizers who have been speaking to this work long before academia caught up, including Toronto Mad Pride, Critical Resistance, the Mapping Police Violence database, No Más Muertes (No More Deaths), and INCITE (Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence).
What do you hope your research will contribute to the broader academic or activist communities?
I hope it helps push mad studies toward greater alignment with racial justice and abolitionist frameworks. And I hope it offers language for activists and scholars trying to name the structures that render some people dangerous and others grievable.
How do you envision the future of mad studies, and where do you see your work within that future?
I envision a mad studies that is abolitionist, intersectional, and aligned with grassroots movements. One that challenges the whiteness and academic gatekeeping of its current formations and centres those most impacted by psychiatric violence. I see my work as pushing toward that future—one that understands madness as both a site of risk and a site of resistance.
What advice would you give to other students interested in activism from the margins or in mad studies?
Start with the voices that aren’t in your syllabus. Follow activists along with academics. Let your lived experience be a source of insight rather than something to compartmentalize. And find collaborators who challenge you to be more accountable.
What has been the most rewarding or challenging part of your academic journey so far?
The most challenging part has been learning how to write through grief and rage without softening them for institutional comfort. But that’s also been the most rewarding part: learning how to honour the people and movements I write about, without compromising the urgency that brought me to this work in the first place.