The Shadow Conference: Disability, Debility, and Impairment in the Academic Mundane

As a means of examining the gap between my personal experience loving someone who is “schizophrenic” and the ways that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term, I propose an academic “date” with Deleuze, and (when he tags along) also Guattari. In the months to come, I will read Deleuze's philosophical works, as many as I can, including those he wrote with Guattari. My hope is to see if a deeper understanding of his approach helps soothe my visceral response. I’ll learn about both men's careers as psychoanalysts. As I read, I will write freely in response, weaving in aspects of my own experience as a caretaker, a mother, a feminist, and a scholar of religion. My approach will be fragmentary and highly personalized. It might stray into the poetic. It will almost certainly involve tears, which may or may not be written into the text that emerges.

This presentation explores single motherhood as a threat to academic labor and institutional “good citizenry.” Using autotheory, I discuss what it feels like to be that which burdens the proper-time of the institution because of the crip-time of care work. Questions explored include: what exhausted labor reveals about the ideologies of academia; what crip theories look like from the standpoint of a caretaker of the ill and the traumatized; how experiences of exhaustion in those of us whose bodies have flowed more easily through academic spaces might ingender a deeper solidarity with those historically marginalized in academia; how my concepts of agamaphobia–the fear of singleness–and a hermeneutic of the indignantly undignified can offer inroads into the democratization of care and the cripping of academic labor; and how forced transitions from “highly productive” academics to bad institutional citizens call us to reject citizenship in favor of collective care. 

Since I began my sabbatical two and a half months ago, I have suffered from a persistent viral infection that blurs the vision in my right eye. Reading on a screen often  triggers migraine headaches. Anti-virals, eye drops, and high-dose prednisone tablets are just beginning to bring the infection under control. But with nearly 70 precious days of leave already gone, I am exhausted from doing battle with a dormant virus my ophthamologist says is typically activated by stress and exhaustion. How am I supposed to write creative papers suitable for peer-reviewed journals when I can barely keep my eyes open? Reflecting on the relationship between literal and creative blurred vision has come to be part of my coping strategy. I also ponder the relationships among stress, anxiety, illness, and creativity, particularly in light of unequal and gendered institutional expectations.

This paper makes use of deeply personal social media posts and psychoanalytic theory to explore the experiences of and conditions of academic life in recent years. It particular, it explores the possibility and limits of maternal subjectivity in relation to disability and life as an academic mother. By staging this dialogue between forms, the papers asks if dominant theories of academic and maternal subjectivity can account for a mother-child relation that is irreducible to normative accounts of academic agency and psychoanalytic theories of self.

Drawing on the author’s personal experience with an under-studied chronic illness and memoirs by disabled authors, this paper argues that affect theorists have inadequately addressed the relationship between biology and society in their conceptions of disability. At the center of this discussion is a critique of the ways scholars of affect and disability have perpetuated binaries between the social and the biological and between the scientific and the emotional, even while trying to disrupt them. Through examples of the compounded uncertainty and fatigue of searching for a diagnosis, as well as those of the pleasure of developing scientific knowledge about one's own body, the paper argues that the persistence of these binaries not only reinforces the barriers disabled people face, but also prevents scholars from fully capturing the ways that bodies and their worlds, science and emotion, and biology and culture are intimately intertwined.

In this paper, I will define “brooding” as a form of creative resistance in response to the debilitating effects of racial battle fatigue and anti-Blackness. Drawing inspiration from Howard Thurman’s use of the term “brooding” to refer to a mothering Spirit,[1] Lucille Clifton’s poem “night vision,” and Catherine Keller’s embrace of creatio ex profundis I will trace the relationship between rest and creativity in connection with the affective of brooding. I argue that brooding, as a form of (at)tending, necessitates a contemplative resistance and attentive care towards “the work our souls must have.”[2]

[1] Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, 84.

[2] From the title of Emilie Townes’ chapter entitled “Ethics as an Art of Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have,” found in Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie Maureen Townes, and Angela D. Sims, Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Presbyterian Publishing Corp, 2011), 35–50.

This paper is unconventional in that it addresses the affective dimensions of anxiety and exhaustion in academia through the language best suited to do so: poetry. Drawing on journal entries and anecdotes from teaching religious studies to college freshman in the classroom, as well as work on the phenomenologyof affect and the promise of happiness (Ahmed), I explore the affective contours of living under constant pressure in my visiting professorship: "publish or perish;" dealing with ChatGPT; post-pandemic pedagogies and porous classrooms; emotional office hours; compassion fatigue; all at an institution, like many others, with an uncertain financial future. It seems I have two opposing voices in my head: one that reminds of how anxious and tired I feel, and the other that encourages me to keep teaching.

We live in a time of incessant distractions; it is becoming increasingly difficult to practice the discipline required for the sustained, critical inquiry that scholarship demands. Or does it? What new modes of inquiry might arise if we learned from distractions, if we allowed our thinking to be shaped by them? What could we learn from scholars who are more susceptible to distraction than others? How might scholars of religion learn from and make space for the intense and wild creativities of people with ADHD, and embrace the creative possibilities that our “interest-based nervous systems” and “compulsions” open up? What can we learn from our distractions? I will consider the experience of being distracted in the context of knowledge production, teaching, and learning as a form of queer and crip failure to conform. Neurodivergent experiences of distraction might resonate with theories of liberatory pedagogy to challenge neuro-normative assumptions about attention, animacy, and the social nature of thinking and learning.