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This paper aims to explore the use of lived experience research in peer work.

A suite of user-friendly and engaging lived experience research resources was introduced to consumers by peer workers. In-depth interviews were conducted with 33 consumer participants and five peer workers about their experiences. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis.

The role of the peer workers appeared critical in ensuring that participants, despite their varied needs, preferences and backgrounds, derived optimum benefit from each resource. Features in resource delivery that promoted a positive experience included presenting the resources in the context of an existing relationship, providing clear explanations, going through resources together, encouraging reflection, taking enough time; and flexible delivery. Peer workers viewed the resources as potentially useful in their everyday peer work and as a valuable addition to their peer work toolkit.

The benefit of lived experience research to consumers is likely to be optimised by supportive and thoughtful delivery of the resources. Peer workers have the skills and are in an ideal position to do this. Bringing lived experience research to consumers provides peer workers with a potentially unique and helpful approach for supporting and promoting recovery and is congruent with their overall practice.

Lived experience research has the potential to benefit consumers directly but is rarely brought to their attention. This paper is the first to examine the potential role of peer workers in introducing learnings from lived experience research to consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to make visible the ways in which peoples’ experiences of mental ill health are coordinated and produced in the workplace setting.

This institutional ethnography draws from data collected from 16 informants in one Canadian industrial manufacturing plant to explicate how texts organize activities and align worker consciousness and actions with company expectations of a “bona fide” illness.

The findings demonstrate how a “bona fide” illness is textually mediated by biomedical and physical work restrictions, thus creating a significant disjuncture between an experiential and ruling perspective of mental ill health.

The work of employees living with self-reported depression becomes organized locally and translocally around the discourse of “mental illness is an illness like any other.” This presents a profound disjuncture between the embodied experience of being too unwell to mentally perform work duties, and the textually coordinated practices of what it means to access sick time for a “bona fide illness” within a biomedical-based attendance management protocol.

The current study adds to the literature by shedding light on the disjuncture created between the embodied experience of mental health issues and the ruling perspective of what constitutes a bona fide illness, adding a unique focus on how people’s use of attendance management-related supports in the workplace.

The authors articulate a posthuman politics of hope to unpack the richly embodied personal experiences and web of relationalities formed through repeated encounters with insects. Interrogating insect speciesism teaches to extend the authors’ compassion and live symbiotically with insects. The authors focus on the narrative of insect decline as impacted by colonialism and white supremacy, enabling insect speciesism to flourish alongside exploitation of other human and nonhuman creatures.

The authors pay particular attention the use of everyday language and framing of insects to “other” them, thereby trivializing and demonizing their existence, including “it's *just* a bug” or “they are pests.” Insect speciesism employs similar rhetoric reinforcing discrimination patterns of other nonhuman animals and humans. The authors focus on the unexpected encounters with insects in domestic spaces, such as an office desk, and through the multispecies space of “the allotment.”

The authors reflect on two possible posthuman futures: one where insect speciesism is entrenched and unrepentant; the second a decolonized society where we aspire to live a more compassionate and non-violent existence amidst these remarkable and brilliant creatures we owe our very existence on Earth.

One of the most profound lessons of the crisis-driven epoch of the Anthropocene is this: our existence on Earth is intimately bound with the flourishing of all forms of life. This includes complex multispecies encounters between humans and insects, an area of enquiry widely neglected across the social sciences. Faced with imminent catastrophic decline and extinction of insect and invertebrate populations, human relationships with these fellow Earthlings are deserving of further attention.