Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Communication Studies

First Advisor

Bernadette Marie Calafell

Second Advisor

Christina Foust

Third Advisor

Santhosh Chandrasekar

Fourth Advisor

Erin Willer

Keywords

Higher education, Intersectionality, Mental disability, Performance, Phenomenology

Abstract

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.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Caleb Green

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

231 p.

Discipline

Communication

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