Document Actions

Researching with Illness, Pain and Disability

When

Nov 24, 2026 from 10:30 to 12:30 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

MFR, online

Contact Name

Add event to calendar

iCal

 

Abstract

What are the interruptions and fluctuations that disability, pain, and illness cause when we write, read, and research? What negotiations do we make with our bodies and its diverse responses to our work, when we sit/stand/lie down/move around to work? What boundaries do we create with our disabilities in the allowances we give them to manage our lives and how do our disabilities create boundaries, for us and with our work when they lead us towards moments of rest? 

This workshop intends to sit with some of these questions to consider how bodies in different degrees of pain are affected by the very process of researching and how one’s research is often—if not always—shaped and influenced by the various interruptions disability (physical, neurological, invisible) and illness cause. These interruptions and pauses we take to readjust into the chair, and the breaths we take to release tension in our joints are not written into the chapters and papers we write. Pain, disability, and illness accompany us in the theoretical arguments we make, follow us in the fields and archives we visit, mediate the conversations we have with our participants and audiences,  guide us as we think about how long a paragraph should be, and are inextricably tied to our writing flows and blocks. In this workshop, we will talk about how disabilities, illnesses, pain, and other forms of precarity, anxieties, and uncertainties affect the different parts of our research. We will attempt to weave together the different vocabularies, nuances, “inconsistencies”, “dissonances”, “contradictions”, and perhaps even “pleasures”[1] that arise as we let ourselves pay attention to them (or distract ourselves from them!). Instead of thinking through a ‘curative’ or solution-based model, this workshop hopes to have a dialogue with the cripistemologies[2] that emerge through our discussions, thoughts, feelings, and pain. 

The workshop is divided into three parts. The first part begins with a brief reading of excerpts from Johanna Hedva’s essays, “The Sick Woman Theory” and “How to Tell When We Will Die” and proceeds to open a safe space for participants to discuss and share their experiences with precariousness, pain and disability—visible and invisible, temporary and chronic. In the second part, the workshop will engage with a selection of crip poetry. If participants already have a poem or artwork in mind, they are encouraged to share them in the space. Following this, we will do a brief, fifteen-minute, writing session where we try to write our pain, interruptions, anxieties and disability into a piece of scholarly writing, like the dissertation chapter or a conference paper. Participants can either work with an already written text or write something spontaneously. The third and final section will be devoted to thinking about the potentiality of forming a crip community in the institutions, neighbourhoods, and spaces that we are a part of. We may consider what it means to engage in radical forms of care[3] for our friends, co-workers, strangers, and ourselves as we read, attend conferences, engage in fieldwork, and write our dissertation.

Reading for the workshop: “The Sick Woman Theory” by Johanna Hedva. Participants are encouraged to read the text beforehand, but it is not mandatory. Find the link here. 

Lecturer: Archana Ravi

Please sign up here!

[1] 1 Chi Wing Lau, T. “The Crip Poetics of Pain”. https://amodern.net/article/the-crip-poetics-of-pain/

[2] Johnson, M.L., & McRuer, R. (2014). Cripistemologies: Introduction. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8(2), 127-147. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548847

[3] Hedva, J. “Sick Woman Theory”. How to Tell When We Will Die, 46.