Keyword: graduate students

For Graduate Students, When the Sadness is Unbelievable: How to Research and Write If We Must When the World is on Fire

Tân Bình, "Raindrops on Glass Window," 2016. Photo used with permission.
By Kim Fernandes

This essay is a meditation on the place of grief in graduate student life, an accounting for the ways that the pandemic has shaped research and the work that disabled graduate students have had to do to stay afloat. I begin by meandering through the grief of a family bereavement into the range of other kinds of crip grief that emerged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thinking with grief across scales, I ask the following questions: what might it mean to research and to write when our fields of inquiry shift even as they are being studied? How might we hold on to hope as a political practice even as undercurrents of grief work to wash it away? Where and how might we find and work with methodologies and practices that prioritize our embodied experiences during precarious, difficult times? Drawing on Melissa Kapadia’s work on chronic illness methodology and Gökce Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe’s manifesto for patchwork ethnography, I attend to the place of patchwork as a survival strategy for and beyond field research. Ultimately, this essay works with grief’s non-linearity, patching together memories and experiences to document one experience of the early years of the pandemic as means of making the aloneness of our graduate journeys less commonplace.

Roundtable: Crip Student Solidarity in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Photo courtesy of Karolina Grabowska.
By Sohini Chatterjee, Keely Grossman, Rachel Jobson, Kristen Kowlessar and River Rossi

This roundtable shares the first-hand experiences of five crip, disabled, Mad, and/or neurodivergent doctoral students navigating academia in so-called Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. While we discuss and theorize our experiences of ableism, structural oppression, and inaccessibility in the academy, we also highlight the world-building experiences of solidarity that have emerged for us in crip community, and in particular among fellow crip graduate students. We consider the ways that crip students open up potential for new ways of learning and being by challenging dominant norms of academic productivity, and we also consider what is lost when these students are pushed out of academic spaces. By engaging in “collective refusal” of the conditions that harm disabled and otherwise marginalized students, new possibilities emerge for connection, community, and radical change. The virtual conversation transcribed here took place over Discord, email, and Google Docs in autumn of 2021 and early winter 2022. This piece embraces multi-tonality, that is, a range of different voices and ways of writing, speaking, and communicating. It is a conversational piece that intentionally blends varied approaches to knowledge-sharing: polemic, citationally-grounded, and personal anecdotes drawn from our diverse lived experiences. There are a number of different themes woven throughout the text, including anecdotes and personal history, solidarity, ableism in the academy, pessimism/failure, community/interdependence/intimacy, and utopia/futurity/demands for the future. While not intended to provide policy guidance or step-by-step instructions for changing academic culture, we also begin to sketch out some of our dreams for an alternative future for disabled scholars. We discuss imagined futures and possibilities, and ask, is a truly crip and/or accessible academic institution possible?