Dreaming Through the Cracks

In social services, we are considered to have “fallen through the cracks” when our needs are not addressed by the system. This occurs when supports are unavailable or inadequate (e.g. not culturally grounded), or when the system is not equipped to categorize our experiences and needs — let alone understand them.

Access to accommodation is dependent on our experiences being recognized by the state (via gatekeeping systems) as indicative of disability (Jasbir Puar, 2017), a process which “reproduces raced and classed narratives about who is to blame for their difficulties and who deserves help” (Rachel Gorman, 2013, p. 278).

In contrast to liberal frameworks of disability which seek to foster inclusion via a claim to rights, Jasbir Puar (2017) uses the language of debilitation to “[foreground] the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled” (xiii-xiv), with an attention that extends beyond the bodymind. She uses this framework to analyze the debilitation of Palestinians by the Israeli state in the form of imposed restrictions on their mobility, capacity to organize, and access medical care and food — restrictions which have only intensified in the past few months.

The framework of disability is similarly incapable of adequately responding to the experience of living through a global pandemic. It cannot account for the debilitation associated with the increased racism and violence toward East Asian people and racialized people more generally, the rise of fascism, and the normalization of eugenic discourse in the push to return to a “normal” — a “normal” that was always ever “a lie meant to pacify us and discourage challenging a society built around racism, ableism, and white supremacy” (Imani Barbarin, 2022, para. 5). It has no way of attending to the grief of losing our loved ones, becoming estranged from our communities, ending relationships with people that felt protecting our lives was too much of an “inconvenience,” and watching the futures we imagined for ourselves be stolen away.

the academy as a place of debilitation

In 2021, during the height of the Omicron wave, McMaster began their mandatory return to campus. As someone deemed “high-risk” by the medical and accommodation systems (i.e. my needs were deemed legitimate, while others’ were not), I received formal accommodations to zoom into my in-person classes. The next year, I began my MA at York, only to have this same accommodation denied. I have heard similar reports from McMaster students since I have left — having their access stripped away even as rates of COVID-19 continue to surge.

McMaster is not only failing in its duty to accommodate disabled students and staff, but also responsible for their ongoing debilitation and disablement — permitting COVID-19 to circulate freely across campus, unmonitored since June 1, 2022 (McMaster University, 2022). This is not unique to McMaster; rather, it is the “business as usual” to which post-secondary education has returned. The academy is ultimately a place of mass debilitation.

A raise of hands — how many of you remember:

• pulling all-nighters to study for an exam or finish a paper?
• falling asleep at your computer, or while writing an exam?
• submitting an assignment at 11:59pm, mere seconds before the deadline (knowing full well your professor would not start marking it in the middle of the night)?
• going to class sick, because you felt you couldn’t afford to miss the content, or lose the participation grade?
• hustling between classes, work, volunteer gigs, and/or a placement required for your degree — all so that you would become “competitive” in the job market after you graduate?

We tell ourselves that next week will be better, that we will finally have a time for rest — but “next week” gets pushed back months, years, decades… until our bodyminds strike, protesting a world built on the endless extraction of lifeforce necessary to sustain a system that never cared for us outside our ability to keep the wheels turning.

This culture is deeply toxic and has extensive impacts on our mental, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual wellness: it is deeply debilitating. University wellness campaigns cite the high rates of mental health concerns in youth, as if our age was to blame, to conceal the truth: that they are making us sick.

This toxicity is not unique to academia, but rather reflective of our colonial capitalist presents as a whole. Some say the goal of academia is to prepare us for the “real world,” which, in a sense, may be true: Tricia Hersey (2022) writes of the academy as a place of indoctrination into grind culture, a collaboration of capitalism and white supremacy. Academia teaches us to equate value with productivity, via the proxy of grades; it is where we learn that the world is relentless, and that the only way to survive is to “toughen up,” to sacrifice softness for ourselves and others in the endless struggle for survival. The irony is that by accepting this premise and accommodating grind culture, we reinforce it — thus reproducing futures which are merely more of the same.

Image Description: An orange cat sitting on a porch, surrounded by plants and flip-flops. A gold banner overlays the image, with the words “can you imagine a world where we can do more than survive?”

A raise of hands — how many of you remember:

• not doing readings?
• skipping class to nap?
• daydreaming of dropping out?
• deciding not to do an assignment — because it just wasn’t worth it?

These are acts of resistance and moments of revolution. What if we stayed here, and listened to what they have to teach us? J. Logan Smilges (2023) writes of “access thievery” as a way of getting our needs met outside the system, without permission — by stealing access from a system that has effectively stolen access from us in the first place.

We are stealing access via rest. Capitalism and academia indoctrinate us to believe that rest must be “earned,” but Tricia Hersey (2022) reminds us that “rest is a divine right” (p. 60). When we steal rest, we are deprogramming from grind culture in a small and important way. We are pushing back against frameworks that claim to know our needs better than we do ourselves. We are stealing access to a life outside our ability to produce and consume — and living it in the present.

neglect as a generative space

Last year, while working on my major research paper on peer support futures (Calvin Prowse, 2023), I began thinking with fungi to dream outside the limits of realism. I thought of the mold that thrives in “neglected” spaces like my shower that I never remember to clean. I learned from mold that neglect — that being forgotten about — can be a generative space.

I am far from advocating for futures of neglect which merely reproduce the same violence of the present. Rather, I am arguing that neglect can be a generative space for dreaming care-full worlds — worlds free from neglect and injustice.

Neglect provides us with an opportunity to reimagine what care can look like outside the jurisdiction of existing systems. Our yearning for something different “reminds us that there is something missing, that the present … is not enough” (José Esteban Muñoz, 2009/2019, p. 100). Falling through the cracks, then, becomes a potential site of liberation — a phenomenon that leaves echoes of the “not-yet-here” (p. 12) that could and should be.

Although I received formal accommodations for most of my academic journey (which were certainly helpful, at times), they merely fostered my inclusion within an exclusionary system rather than bring me closer to freedom. This form of integrative access “prioritiz[es] the realignment of disabled people with existing institutional and economic norms over challenging the society that created them” (J. Logan Smilges, 2023, p. 15), thus promising futures where injustice is merely redistributed rather than eliminated.

Image Description: A mountain range overlaid with the words: “I don’t want inclusion; I want liberation.”   

And yet, I have felt the echoes of utopia, of alternative futures, in the here and now, within the debilitating confines of the academy. When I look back on my experiences of liberatory access in the academy — described by Mia Mingus (2017) as “access for the sake of connection, justice, community, love and liberation” (para. 31) — the most poignant examples have more often than not taken place outside of formal administrative structures. Sometimes this has been the result of professors going beyond (and outside of) their legal duty to accommodate; other times, it has emerged through creatively navigating (in)accessibility with my disabled friends and peers.

When everyone was forced back to campus, I was left behind. Zooming into my in-person classes, I only had access to half of the class: I could only hear the students on the same side of the classroom as the laptop I was zooming in on. During discussions, I couldn’t contribute: nobody was watching the laptop, so no one noticed when I raised my hand. On paper, my accessibility needs were met; in practice, this was just a different form of exclusion.

One class, I messaged my friend and classmate Jodie to complain. Jodie was sitting on the other side of the room and could hear those students well – but couldn’t hear the students on my side of the classroom (where the laptop was). In the span of a few moments, we mobilized: I used my phone to generate a live transcript of the zoom feed and shared it with her; she called me on speakerphone so I could hear her side of the class, and raised her hand for me whenever I had something to add.

Image Description: A collage depicting the classroom layout and how Jodie and Calvin used technology to enhance access for one another. The left side of the collage’s background is a desert, and the right side is a grassy field with trees, lakes, and roads. The background divides the image in half behind a table with six faces arranged around it, indicating the limits of what Calvin and Jodie could hear before mobilizing to enhance access. The letter J is at the bottom right of the table, indicating Jodie’s position in the classroom. Offset above the table is the letter C, indicating Calvin’s position outside of the classroom, joining through Zoom. A telephone sits on the left side of the table, with the words “transmission in progress” on the screen. A gold telephone wire extends from the television, connects with Calvin, and loops around the right side of the table to reach Jodie. Alongside the wire, the following sentence appears, indicating a live transcript: “i thought Campbell & Gregor’s (2002) description of IE [Institutional Ethnography] was really interesting… they do a great job at describing Dorothy Smith’s thinking.”

It was messy and imperfect and it sure as hell shouldn’t’ve been necessary, but it was beautiful nonetheless — grounded in love and care and a demand for justice: justice that, if not given freely, would be taken by force. We showed up for each other; we made things better, together.

When describing the utopia for which I yearn, I often find it difficult to articulate what these futures might look like in practice. But operationalizing dreams is always a work of translation and sometimes I think we might be better served to sit with the affective rather than the material; instead of asking ourselves “what does utopia look like?” perhaps we should be asking: “what does utopia feel like?”

Image Description: A collage. The background image is of a desert with tracks made up of three footprint-like indents in the sand, repeating in a spiral towards a television in the centre. On the television screen is an image of a river overlaid with the chemical structure of anthocyanins, a class of pigments responsible for red, purple, and blue hues in a variety of plant life (Hock Eng Khoo et al., 2017). Above the television are two flowers and one leaf from a purple basil plant, arranged as if they were an antenna. Behind the television is half a lemon, as if it was the sun peering over the horizon. The bottom of the image reads: “What does Utopia FEEL LIKE?”

Utopia feels like love.

A care-full utopia, like love, is grounded in relationship and a genuine commitment to each other. Of course, we do not need to like someone to love them, to care about them, to be committed to their liberation, to recognize that their right to justice is non-negotiable. We need to show up for each other, even (and especially) when it’s hard, because we all matter.

We matter.

(And we can change the world.)

References

Calvin Prowse (2023). Dreaming peer support futures [Major Research Paper, York University]. https://hdl.handle.net/10315/41497

Hock Eng Khoo, Azrina Azlan, Sou Teng Tang & See Meng Lim (2017). Anthocyanidins and anthocyanins: Colored pigments as food, pharmaceutical ingredients, and the potential health benefits. Food & Nutrition Research, 61(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/16546628.2017.1361779

Imani Barbarin (2022, February 11). You’re never getting “normal” back. Crutches & Spice. https://crutchesandspice.com/2022/02/11/%EF%BF%BCyoure-never-getting-normal-back/

Jasbir K. Puar (2017). The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Duke University Press.

Logan Smilges (2023). Crip negativity. University of Minnesota Press.

José Esteban Muñoz (2019). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. (Original work published 2009)

Marie Campbell, & Frances Gregor (2002). Mapping social relations: A primer in doing institutional ethnography. University of Toronto Press.

McMaster University (May 16, 2022). Updates to McMaster’s COVID-19 safety measures. COVID-19 Back to Mac. https://covid19.mcmaster.ca/updates-to-mcmasters-covid-19-safety-measures/

Mia Mingus (2017, April 12). Access intimacy, interdependence and disability justice. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/

Rachel Gorman (2013). Mad nation? Thinking through race, class, and Mad identity politics. In B. A. LeFrançois, R. Menzies, & G. Reaume (Eds.), Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian Mad studies (pp. 269–280). Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.

Tricia Hersey (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

Collage Materials

Hock Eng Khoo, Azrina Azlan, Sou Teng Tang & See Meng Lim (2017). Anthocyanidins and anthocyanins: Colored pigments as food, pharmaceutical ingredients, and the potential health benefits. Food & Nutrition Research, 61(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/16546628.2017.1361779

José Esteban Muñoz (2019). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. (Original work published 2009)

Lukas (2018). Close-up photo of sliced yellow lemon on white surface. Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-sliced-yellow-lemon-on-white-surface-1414110/

National Geographic (1979, November), 156(5). Courtesy of the Hamilton Zine Club.

Telephone clipart (n.d.). Creazilla. https://creazilla.com/nodes/33733-telephone-clipart