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Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches

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A special issue of Social Sciences (ISSN 2076-0760). This special issue belongs to the section "Community and Urban Sociology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2024) | Viewed by 13907

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Dr. Caroline Lenette

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Guest Editor

School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney 2031, Australia
Interests: social health; arts-health research; participatory research; trauma-informed approaches; gender-sensitive research
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The sociocultural aspects of suicide occupy a relatively small space in the literature on this topic, whereas biomedical and mental health framings dominate the discipline of suicidology. Despite the growing recognition that “Eurocentric configurations” (Tisha X and marcela polanco, 2021) and western-centric notions of suicidality reflect colonial ideologies, the realms of knowledge grounded in Indigenous and majority-world expertise are not always validated to the same degree in suicide research, and by extension, in practical contexts. Critical suicide studies, a discipline that expands and enhances conventional biomedical approaches by engaging with lived experiences, power relations, social justice, and the histories that frame knowledge on suicidality have shifted the debate, but they require more nuanced perspectives if they are to continue to disrupt normative approaches. To reimagine how scholars, advocates, and practitioners think about and address suicidality, new scholarly spaces are needed to explore this topic from a critical, sociocultural angle.

Participatory creative methods and practices represent culturally safe and trauma-informed approaches to ethical research on suicidality, with much potential to disrupt the colonial underpinnings of the current knowledge. The impact of using participatory creative approaches such as filmmaking, immersive reality, or poetry, rather than positivist, standardized tools in research on self-harm, trauma, and suicidality, has been documented extensively (e.g., Lynn Froggett and Jill Bennett, 2023).

This Special Issue focusses on critical suicide studies, and more specifically, a sociocultural lens through which to examine and understand suicide using participatory creative methods. It aims to answer the following questions at the core of decolonizing suicidology:

How does historical or intergenerational trauma from colonization, enslavement, confinement, abuse, displacement, detention, incarceration, torture, and genocide shape experiences of suicide?
What are the contextual specificities and ethical considerations of participatory creative approaches in critical suicide studies?
What is being silenced in critical suicide studies from a decolonial perspective?
What can we do differently to achieve what Kristen Cardon (2021) calls “suicide justice”, which demands more accountability between settler suicide workers and the people and communities they work with?

This Special Issue aims to advance the debates on this topic in order to produce more precise scholarly work on critical suicide studies based on First Nations knowledge and a majority-world praxis. The focus on participatory creative models will expand the methodological literature and point to their potential as ethical methods within suicidology. Scholars with lived experiences of suicide (i.e., personal experiences of suicidal thoughts or attempts, caring for suicidal persons, or being bereaved or affected by suicide in any way) are encouraged to submit.

Please submit your proposals and any questions to Dr. Caroline Lenette <c.lenette@unsw.edu.au> by 16 February 2024. Notification of acceptance will be provided by 1 March 2024. Final papers are due on 31 October 2024 for peer review.

Proposals should be one page in length and include a title, an abstract explaining its relevance to the Special Issue topic, a description of the population, and the methods used (if applicable). Also include author names and affiliations.

Dr. Caroline Lenette
Guest Editor

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

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Keywords

critical suicide studies
decolonizing suicidology
sociocultural perspectives
First Nations knowledge
majority-world expertise
creative methods
participatory research
lived experience of suicide
suicide justice

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Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

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12 pages, 233 KiB

Open AccessArticle

When Silence Speaks: A Reflection on Engaging in Expressive Arts Activities and Thoughts of Suicide

by Lydia Gitau

Soc. Sci. 2025, 14(5), 296; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14050296 (registering DOI) - 12 May 2025

Abstract

Deep, potent silences sometimes underlie thoughts of suicide. This paper presents a personal reflection of silence as a form of expression, and examines how engaging in expressive arts activities may reveal and help in processing feelings of distress and thoughts of suicide. There is an additional layer of hegemony that the use of words adds to discussions of suicidality, which makes these discussions inaccessible to many of the disenfranchised, including people from a refugee background for whom English is not a first language. But, for those struggling with speaking the (English) language in the first place, at what level of language acquisition can they be deemed fit to express and accurately represent their thoughts and ideas about suicide? Does their silence count? And so, by tackling this dilemma, this paper seeks to examine alternative ways of expression that do not heavily rely on words. It explores how, in our undertaking of suicidality studies creatively, we may embody and dignify the ways of the marginalised that have been devalued by a colonialist or interventionist agenda. The paper is an exercise in re-writing their experiences from the critical consciousness of coloniality. It is a disassembling of the control, domination, and exploitation that words can have. It is an attempt to shift the source and profile of knowledge about suicide from those who wield the power and privilege of words to those who live in the margins, shielded by silence. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

27 pages, 380 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Critical Suicide Notes: On Witnessing and Prefigurative Politics

by Jeffrey P. Ansloos and Jennifer H. White

Soc. Sci. 2025, 14(3), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14030140 - 25 Feb 2025

Viewed by 586

Abstract

This paper reimagines the study of suicide as a critical, relational practice rooted in solidarity and transformative possibilities. Moving beyond the limitations of conventional suicidology, this work emphasizes the importance of attending to the broader social, political, and structural contexts that shape experiences of suicidality. By framing this work as a collection of “notes,” this paper calls for an approach that notices, marks, and responds to both the violence and resistance inherent in these experiences. This paper introduces witnessing, dreaming, and prefiguration as key methodologies for Critical Suicide Studies. Witnessing is conceptualized as an active and relational practice that centers on the lived realities of those affected by suicide, making their stories and the systems of harm that often go unaddressed, visible. Dreaming involves imagining futures beyond survival, where care and justice guide collective responses. Prefiguration focuses on enacting these futures in the present, embedding relational and community-based approaches in the everyday practices of suicide care and research. Through these practices, this paper explores how Critical Suicide Studies can move from critique to action, creating conditions in which responses to suicide are life-affirming, relational, and grounded in mutual care. This work aspires to cultivate spaces for collective healing, dignity and transformative change. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

20 pages, 9145 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Unspoken, Unseen, Unheard: Using Arts-Based and Visual Research Methods to Gain Insights into Lived Experiences of Suicide in Young Adults

by Jude Smit, Erminia Colucci and Lisa Marzano

Soc. Sci. 2025, 14(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14020062 - 26 Jan 2025

Viewed by 1649

Abstract

Suicide is often referred to as a silent killer, and the need to break down barriers and build bridges to communication and understanding remains of vital importance. Working within the field of further and higher education for more than 18 years with students experiencing suicidal thoughts, feelings, and behaviours has highlighted how often deep pain, grief, and trauma go unspoken, unseen, and unheard. Societal and cultural stigma, judgement, misunderstanding, and assumptions remain, all of which silence and can lead to a negative sense of self, others, and a person’s experience of being in the world. This article shows how using arts-based and visual research methods, as part of a mixed methods study, can offer unique insights into the inner world of lived experiences. It draws on analysis of 62 artworks made by 20 students between the ages of 16 and 25 with personal experiences of attempted suicide. These included two-dimensional pieces, sculpture, photography, poetry, and digital art. The research methodology is also discussed, including a 5/6-step approach to the analysis of visual data and data synthesis that has been created to ensure a robust, socially contextualised, and framed analysis. This follows polytextual thematic analysis using a multimodal approach and draws on visual social semiotics. Analysis of visual and arts-based data has revealed aspects of meaning that would otherwise not have been identified. This has led to the development of a model that can help us better understand the cycle of stigma and judgement and how we may be able to break it. This article demonstrates how a creative approach provides a means to share some of the complexity of feelings in a relatable way that has the capacity to bridge the divide between what is hidden and what is seen, bringing this human experience out of the shadows. It aims to honour everyone whose experiences have gone unseen, unspoken, and unheard, as well as the research participants’ wish for their artworks to be shared as a way to challenge the stigma that silences. It further hopes to demonstrate the power of arts-based and visual methods in research whilst also acknowledging some of their limitations so that they can be used more widely with under-represented, marginalised, and silenced voices. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

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17 pages, 3023 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Performance Methodologies in Suicide Prevention Research: Queerness, Colonization, and Co-Performative Witnessing in Indigenous Community

by Antonia R. G. Alvarez

Soc. Sci. 2025, 14(1), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14010011 - 31 Dec 2024

Viewed by 723

Abstract

Performance methodologies take many forms—performative writing, poetic transcription, and co-performative witnessing, to name only a few—and can be both process and product, differentiating and unifying a group between and across differences. As a social work researcher committed to decolonial, liberatory methodologies that make and bring meaning to the communities I work with, performance methodologies fill a gap that other qualitative research methods can only begin to approach. This project is an exploration in performance methodologies and Critical Suicidology through the lens of social work research, with a case study derived from a performance documenting suicide prevention research with Native Hawaiians. This study sought to understand connections between suicide risk and experiences of colonization among Native Hawaiians and among LGBTQ Native Hawaiians. The findings point to the importance of relationships, cultural understandings of identity and identification, and healing through cultural practices. Sections from the performative text, including voices from the participants, as well as feedback gathered from performances of the research, are woven together with academic narrative to form a creative and critical report of the research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

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16 pages, 309 KiB

Open AccessArticle

‘I Can’t Even Talk to My Parents About It’: South Sudanese Youth Advocates’ Perspectives on Suicide Through Reflexive Discussions and Collaborative Poetic Inquiry

by Amani Kasherwa, Caroline Lenette, Achol Arop and Ajang Duot

Soc. Sci. 2024, 13(12), 644; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13120644 - 28 Nov 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1642

Abstract

The issue of suicide has garnered considerable attention in refugee scholarship, where research examines how unique forced migration and resettlement challenges exacerbate risks and vulnerabilities to suicide. However, there are gaps in understanding the social and cultural factors shaping the lived experience of suicide in refugee communities. Using the example of young people of African backgrounds in Australia, this paper presents a collaboration among two academics and two South Sudanese youth advocates to explore the sociocultural factors impacting suicidality through reflexive discussions and collaborative poetry. This combined approach offered a unique and nuanced conceptual and methodological framework to contribute culturally specific narratives to critical suicide studies and challenge western-centric and biomedical perspectives on suicide. The process highlighted (i) the lack of dialogue about suicide in the South Sudanese community and (ii) the absence of community-based support structures to address suicide. This paper provides useful insights into the culturally specific context of suicide, adding refugee perspectives to the discipline of critical suicide studies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

16 pages, 314 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Suicide and the Coloniality of the Senses, Time, and Being: The Aesthetics of Death Desires

by marcela polanco and Anthony Pham

Soc. Sci. 2024, 13(11), 576; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13110576 - 25 Oct 2024

Viewed by 1811

Abstract

We engage the decolonial option from Abya Yala, el Caribe, and Eastern Europe with an interest in suicide from our struggles as racialized people and our dehumanization, whereby, for many of us, suicide is not an act of autonomy or resistance but the reaffirmation of death as an ongoing state of living. This is the permanent reality of existence concocted by coloniality and its constitutive effect on lived experience. We depart from the assumption that suicide materializes according to someone’s thinking about the world and of a particular philosophy. Thus, predominantly, suicide is the universal name someone’s knowledge has given to an experience; and whose experience is named as such is consequently universally configured as a suicidal being. Here, we discuss suicide from understandings that come from non-discursive domains, and from a different genealogy than western Europe’s; the coloniality of the senses, time and being. We attempt to story what violence does in relation to an already violent circumstance, suicide, therapists and hotline workers, and undocumented lives in the U.S., when singularly imposing one way of the world. We are interested in adding visibility to the legacy of erasure and violence that the epistemologies and ontologies of suicide, suicide assessments, and therapists’ clinical judgements perpetuate; further sustaining dehumanization and the imposition of death as a constant in life. We discuss a crisis suicide call as the lay of the land of modernity’s suicide assessments, constructed as an assemblage from our shared memories on many stories we have heard in our work. We annotate it as it unfolds, reflecting upon our expected practices in institutionalized settings, under the control of modernity/coloniality that discriminates against pluriversal temporalities, sensings, and relationalities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

20 pages, 297 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Making Sense of Critical Suicide Studies: Metaphors, Tensions, and Futurities

by Luiza Cesar Riani Costa and Jennifer White

Soc. Sci. 2024, 13(4), 183; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13040183 - 22 Mar 2024

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2951

Abstract

Critical suicide studies is a relatively new area of research, practice, and activism, which we believe can offer creative new vantage points with which to ‘think’ suicide into the future. We present findings from a qualitative research study undertaken to understand how critical suicide studies is being conceptualized by those who draw from this orientation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine scholars, practitioners, activists, and/or those with lived and living experience of suicidality. To analyze the data, we used reflexive thematic analysis and drew on a social constructionist orientation. We discovered that metaphors were an important way of conceptualizing and reflecting upon critical suicide studies. Four themes were generated: critical suicide studies is a site of respite and fortification; critical suicide studies is a felt experience; critical suicide studies is a desire line; critical suicide studies is yearning. We contend that the dominant language available to describe suicide and suicide prevention might not be adequate for expressing the complexities and contradictions of suicide prevention practice or suicide’s ultimate unknowability. We call for more diverse, inclusive, and expansive frameworks for understanding and responding to suicide and show the potential of joining other critical scholars and social movements to build a more just, caring, and inclusive world. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

Review

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23 pages, 283 KiB

Open AccessReview

Revaluing Indigenous Models in Suicidology: A Brief Narrative Synthesis

by Joanna Brooke, Caroline Lenette, Marianne Wobcke and Marly Wells

Soc. Sci. 2025, 14(4), 229; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14040229 - 7 Apr 2025

Viewed by 497

Abstract

This review uses an anti-colonial approach to explore the characteristics of Indigenous interventions and best practice relating to suicidality. Well-established interventions led by Indigenous communities exist globally, yet their prevalence in academic discussions of suicide is comparatively limited. This represents a missed opportunity for the field of suicidology to learn from Indigenous community-driven models, which have the potential to be translated across contexts. The challenges of sharing best practice Indigenous interventions in academic literature can be situated within a pervasive colonial discourse, which categorises suicide as an ‘Indigenous problem’ and creates ill-fitted evaluation and intervention methodologies. Here, we provide a brief narrative synthesis of contemporary research on Indigenous suicide intervention models in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the United States and Canada, focusing on key characteristics of interventions and a selection of Indigenous community-driven projects. These characteristics are: cultural and collective approaches as protective factors; recognising social determinants of health and the impact of colonisation; community control and governance; evaluation and available research; and relationships and connection. We discuss issues of sustainability, funding, decontextualised research, and publishing and put forward recommendations for future research. Rebalancing academic discussions to centre Indigenous leadership and culturally grounded research and practice is not without its challenges and complexity but can crucially enrich the field of suicidology. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

Other

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6 pages, 183 KiB

Open AccessEssay

Unwritten Suicide Note: A Meditation on the Other Side

by Adrián I. P-Flores

Soc. Sci. 2025, 14(4), 219; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14040219 - 31 Mar 2025

Viewed by 206

Abstract

This auto-theoretical essay examines the philosophical and historical underpinnings of suicide through a critical analysis of the author’s own suicide note, employing psychoanalytic theory and post-colonial critique. Through historical investigation, the author traces how the concept of suicide, coined in 1642 by Sir Thomas Browne, emerged alongside new configurations of selfhood that were fundamentally shaped by colonial encounters, particularly the “discovery” of America and the rise in modern liberal thought. The analysis reveals how suicide’s conceptual structure is inextricably linked to Western modernity’s founding ruptures, where the capacity for self-destruction became a marker of Western subjectivity while being denied to colonized and enslaved peoples. The author concludes that suicide, far from being a purely personal act, is fundamentally structured by colonial history and white supremacy, functioning as a form of “white enjoyment” that attempts to resolve the metaphysical ruptures at the heart of Western consciousness. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

17 pages, 810 KiB

Open AccessEssay

Danger Is a Signal, Not a State: Bigaagarri—An Indigenous Protocol for Dancing Around Threats to Wellbeing

by Phillip Orcher, Victoria J. Palmer and Tyson Yunkaporta

Soc. Sci. 2025, 14(1), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14010027 - 10 Jan 2025

Viewed by 2214

Abstract

This paper describes the health and wellbeing applications of a protocol designed from a Gumbaynggirr Australian First People’s concept, Bigaagarri. The protocol reframes threats to health and wellbeing as part of a communicative system of environmental signals, rather than an individualised, behavioural fight–flight–fear response. Developed by a Muruwari Gumbaynggirr researcher, the protocol enfolds Aboriginal perspectives of health values and the physicality of personal location in place and social context. It combines Indigenous standpoint theory and lived-experience narrative research methods to translate Indigenous practices into generally accessible modalities. The paper connects the first principles of this protocol to literature, then, using code-switching between academic and informal settler and Indigenous voices, it introduces personal lived experience narratives that include utilisation of the participatory and immersive protocol seen in the graphical abstract image to mitigate suicidal ideation. This approach unsettles Westernised conceptions of health and wellbeing research that privilege disease-specific, single-solution approaches. It contests the dominant social imaginaries and narratives embedded in standard service models, which perpetuate the ongoing recolonisation of Indigenous identities, and common exclusion of others outside of the neurotypical majority. The Bigaagarri protocol is a potential way forward to reimagine preventive health landscapes, decolonise support for suicide and mental health through the embedding of Indigenous knowledges to lead to holistic approaches for wellbeing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Suicide Studies: Decolonial and Participatory Creative Approaches)

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