Western culture individualizes issues of public health. This is especially clear in academic life, where the structures of the university disable atypical bodies and minds in order to force them to simultaneously perform the roles of scholar, teacher, and colleague. The university not only fails to accommodate afflicted minds and bodies, it also produces more precarity in the process. This project is a performance ethnography of my time in the academy, starting with my life as an undergraduate being disciplined into academic life, moving toward recruitment for graduate school, and ending with events surrounding the construction of this very project. I employ the performance ethnography of Dwight Conquergood, informing it with the works of feminists of color such as women making up the collected anthology This Bridge Called My Back edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherie Moraga. I blend this method and theory with intersectional feminist approaches to disability studies, best exemplified by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and, the phenomenological study of emotions articulated by Sara Ahmed. In doing so, I write a project analyzing the ways in which I have been disabled by the academy, as well as enabled at the expense of others attempting to survive within it.
","abstract_html":"<p>Western culture individualizes issues of public health. This is especially clear in academic life, where the structures of the university disable atypical bodies and minds in order to force them to simultaneously perform the roles of scholar, teacher, and colleague. The university not only fails to accommodate afflicted minds and bodies, it also produces more precarity in the process. This project is a performance ethnography of my time in the academy, starting with my life as an undergraduate being disciplined into academic life, moving toward recruitment for graduate school, and ending with events surrounding the construction of this very project. I employ the performance ethnography of Dwight Conquergood, informing it with the works of feminists of color such as women making up the collected anthology <em>This Bridge Called My Back</em> edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherie Moraga. I blend this method and theory with intersectional feminist approaches to disability studies, best exemplified by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and, the phenomenological study of emotions articulated by Sara Ahmed. In doing so, I write a project analyzing the ways in which I have been disabled by the academy, as well as enabled at the expense of others attempting to survive within it.</p>","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Green, Caleb"],"institution":null,"degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Bernadette Marie Calafell","Christina Foust","Santhosh Chandrasekar","Erin Willer"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2020,"date_issued":"2020-01-01T08:00:00Z","date_published":"2020-01-01T08:00:00Z","updated_at":"2026-07-24T02:03:03Z","subjects":["Higher education","Intersectionality","Mental disability","Performance","Phenomenology","Communication","Disability and Equity in Education","Other Communication"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
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