Becoming-undisciplined through my Foray into Disability Studies

Abstract

My pathway to becoming a disability studies researcher has been a series of discontinuities, a circuitous route full of twist and turns with the occasional misstep. Enmeshed in my peregrinations are my academic training as a geographer, my shift in institutional location from geography to an interdisciplinary program, and my everyday life organized around living with chronic illness. As I write my story of these entanglements, I cannot help but understand my career in terms of one refractive ray of I as a subject, assembled together through my foray into disability studies. Writing autobiographically, I explore some of the embodied contours of my career and how my own illness has been part of my intellectual shift. In this article, I reflect on how I write and the assumptions that go into how I use one refractive ray of I as a subject to foreground my movement toward becoming-undisciplined.

Keywords: academic, autobiography, autobiographical writing, becoming, becoming-undisciplined, contested illness, Deleuze and Guattari, embodied knowledge, feminism, interdisciplinarity