Embracing Polyphony: Voices, Improvisation, and the Hearing Voices Network

Abstract

This paper theorizes at the intersection of practices of improvisation and the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) approach—two ways of being with others that embrace polyphonic identity, democratic participation, and polyculture. The paper itself is unapologetically polyvocal, moving between discussion of concepts drawn from Mad Studies and improvisation studies on one hand, and self-reflexive autoethnography on the other. Multiplicity of voice and identity and hearing voices phenomena are often interpreted as weakness, illness, or pathology as defined within bio-psychiatric conventions. In this paper I argue that hearing voices experiences and plurality are part of a broad, rich, and complex spectrum of human experience, and that inclusive frameworks such as the HVN serve to witness and support voice hearers marginalized by current systems which pathologize those outside of a narrowing range of normalcy. Safe spaces such as those created in HVN groups, like spaces for music and dance improvisation, are critical places of resistance that offer hope in the form of democratic creative action in connection with others. In this paper, I explore this terrain through autoethnographic and critical reflection.