CHAPTER FIVE
Part Four
Second practicing academic spaces (Part A)
I am invited to talk at a conference.
To talk about pluriversal literacies in the context of disability and design practice.
It is both face-to-face and online.
Five minutes of talking.
It is at 8 pm.
L is one of the hosts of the session. She knows immediately that 8:00 pm is not a possible time for talking for me. She's been part of the times I have been experimenting with time and bodymind. Exploring group participation online, cognition, heart rate and the day-after effects. We both know 8:00 pm is past my sustainability window. L suggests I make something that can be asynchronously shared. Prepared when I can practice over the coming months and ready to go when the session comes around. I can be at the session virtually if I am able to. I will not have to talk. This bodymind ally thinking from L is so generative for me... and these changes for my full and sustainable participation are more than accommodations. They stem from my needs out. They are given without asking and given easily. She centres my bodymind as practitioner.
As the weeks pass... I am in bed and practice-sensitive.
I have seen many panels.
People are full of personal and source-based information.
Guiding with academically in-tune communication.
I want to explore my second practices as a possible way to share in the academic space.
If I am centering slowness and softness as a way of me researching... then what could soft and slow research sound like?
What might soft and slow research look like?
Would people in academic spaces expecting academic voices and shapes engage with soft and slow voices and shapes of research?
I begin to feel doubt.
So I centre this doubt.
I centre the bed I am both worried and excited to create in.
I grab my ageing Canon SLR.
I create and softly and slowly document from my bed.
Hyperfixated to the maximum.
Exploring and creating completely through second practices.
Unapologetically sharing experience about illness and disability through sick doing and sick creating.
I didn't think it would be at all possible to present on a panel during this time.
My illnesses have not changed... their needs have not changed...
Do you know... the experience of being in the ocean... losing time... and then something makes you look back to the shore and you realise the umbrella or bag or towel that is in your spot on the sand is now twenty, thirty metres to the left or right of where you first entered the water and you have to scan hard to find that spot from where you are now. I remember loving the feeling of this realisation when I was young. Slowly drifting away from where I had begun. I felt a little bit brave on my own in a huge ocean. That is what this feels like. Drifting... shifting far away from where I started... but not realising it.