CHAPTER FIVE
Part Four
Second practicing academic spaces (Part B): Conference Video; A map for staying
[birds singing]
These sounds are the birds at my house.
I am often housebound. At the moment, I am bedbound.
My borders keep moving. My boundaries. The everyday boundaries and borders of illness and disability. Borders close without warning. Boundaries are formed. Borders shrink. Arseli Dokumaci (2023) writes of this experience and disability as ‘environmental shrinkage with its correspondingly contracted affordances’. My bed is a border and leaving it is a border crossing. A socially expected crossing over into performing normative wellness; a map that I lived to without thinking of my own emerging unmapped self boundaries of care.
When I picture this map, I think of a geographic performance piece I once saw. A person is on a bike. They are riding in Amsterdam, but follow the directions of a map of Berlin or of Brussels. Soon after beginning their journey, they ride into a building and fall. They get up and they ride again. They eventually ride into a canal and the piece is finished.
I have realised what I felt shame for as a betrayal of my body was actually shame imposed onto me from a map of ableist systems and paradigms around my body, onto my body, and in my bed. I was following someone else's map into canals every day. And so I slowly and softly surfaced maps of my own. Maps of and from my bedbound every day. Everyday crossings and everyday stayings. Fluid, reflexive and gentle assemblages of daily personal landscapes. Boundaries became invitations. If I saw canals, I built malleable bridges from my own materials and languages. Harvested from my own quarry. Privileging and celebrating my own local geography and ecologies. An engineered construction of pluriversal literacies.
By making my own maps, I began centering the practitioner. Sustainable daily lived experiences and needs. Person and personal process over production. The scale of the bed is the scale of the body. In my research, I've been spending time with this in my practice.
Through an everyday engagement with disability and indigenous and decolonial knowledges, my emerging practice advocates both centering and celebrating individual difference and working with the perspective that there is no separation of ourselves and the systems around us; a continual reciprocation between whole self and whole systems.
A practice that surfaced for me from these methods was Rest as Collaborator. I have embraced my natural boundary lines and I practice with rest. Rest is not passive here. It is an important creative confidant and support that I advocate for myself… and I have seen my work deepen, thicken, and transform through this practice.
[birds singing]
I can't tell you the day… or the moment that I began a radical shift and transformation towards work, creativity, illness and disability. I can tell you that it is an everyday inquiry, it is an everyday practice, that emerges from me and my space in the world, my differences.
I sit at the borders of the everyday and look and listen to them. I let them tell me how to move, what is needed. We are all navigating borders of closed maps and systems. There is no single map, and we should all be able to be cartographers of our professional practices, infused with care… even from bed.