The Professor is Ill: Meritocracy, Unwellness, and the University in Mimi Khúc’s dear elia
The Professor is Ill: Meritocracy, Unwellness, and the University in Mimi Khúc’s dear elia
Join Dr. Mimi Khúc as she shares her work on unwellness and the university from her new book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Applying her framework of a “pedagogy of unwellness,” Dr. Khúc explores the contours of student and faculty unwellness and locates it within the racialized ableism of meritocracy that undergirds university life (and beyond).
Academic hyperproductivity across university strata is a kind of unrelenting dehumanization that relies on something she name “compulsory wellness”—the pressure to always pretend you are ok and achieve at the highest levels. We in the university live and work in a machine that makes us unwell while not allowing us to be unwell and punishes us for being unwell and asks us to punish others for being unwell so that we can prove we are well. Join this event to explore together how to disinvest in this form of university wellness and begin to build structures of care that we need.
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Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is an adjunct, and her work includes Open in Emergency, the Asian American Tarot, and dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, a creative-critical book exploring unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university.
This talk is part of the WGSS Speaker Series in Fall 2024. This is the third of four installments
Join Dr. Mimi Khúc as she shares her work on unwellness and the university from her new book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Applying her framework of a “pedagogy of unwellness,” Dr. Khúc explores the contours of student and faculty unwellness and locates it within the racialized ableism of meritocracy that undergirds university life (and beyond).
Academic hyperproductivity across university strata is a kind of unrelenting dehumanization that relies on something she name “compulsory wellness”—the pressure to always pretend you are ok and achieve at the highest levels. We in the university live and work in a machine that makes us unwell while not allowing us to be unwell and punishes us for being unwell and asks us to punish others for being unwell so that we can prove we are well. Join this event to explore together how to disinvest in this form of university wellness and begin to build structures of care that we need.
--
Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is an adjunct, and her work includes Open in Emergency, the Asian American Tarot, and dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, a creative-critical book exploring unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university.
This talk is part of the WGSS Speaker Series in Fall 2024. This is the third of four installments
Susquehanna Hall falseRSVP
This event is free, hybrid, and open to anyone in the WGSS community (including the general public). To RSVP for the virtual or in-person version of the event, please fill out the RSVP form under the Tickets heading.