[applause]
So just four months before Jenny
Diski received her diagnosis,
and said those
memorable words, I
had a slight pain in my stomach.
And my doctor said, after
a scan, "Run to the ER.
It's acute appendicitis."
So I was dragging my feet,
because I was mowing the lawn,
I was cycling, I thought
the pain was not too much.
And then it was the end
of the spring semester,
and the following week, I was
going to the Sociolinguistic
Symposium in Finland.
And thereafter I had
invitations to speak
in Columbia, Mexico, Taiwan.
So I wasn't too happy.
But then I met a friendly
colorectal surgeon
in Hershey, which is our
teaching hospital, part
of Penn State.
It is two hours
away from my town.
He said, "Hey, just come over.
We'll do a quick
laparoscopic surgery for you,
and you can go
home the next day,
and go to Finland
the following week."
So I said goodbye to my family.
And I said, I'll be back,
and drove out there.
He did the surgery,
and said, "Stay
overnight and if you
can do the three Ps,
then I'll let you go tomorrow."
And the three Ps are passing
gas, peeing, and pooping.
[laughter]
So the next day he comes on
his rounds, at five o'clock,
and I'm dressed to leave.
I recounted all of
the wonderful things
I had achieved in the bathroom.
[laughter]
Then he holds his
hand like this,
which he was going to do for
many, many months after that,
and that was always a sign
of something very bad.
And he said, "I sent your
appendix to pathology.
They usually take five
days for a formal report.
But in your case, they
called me within 24 hours.
You have a cancerous
tumor in your appendix."
And then he goes to a white
chalkboard in that room
that I was staying in.
He wrote down three forms
of appendiceal cancer.
I don't remember
any of those names.
And then he mentioned how my
particular appendiceal cancer
is a very aggressive
one, and the treatments
he was going to do.
I don't remember any of those
things, except for these words.
He said, "Go on extended
disability leave.
Tell your head of
department you are not
going to teach this fall.
Cancel all your trips.
We need to get working quickly."
So, that was the
first time anybody
had used the word
disability to macho me.
And sure enough, as the
treatment progressed,
I became more and more impaired.
So, a month later, on
my wedding anniversary,
July 16, they had an
eight hour surgery.
And they removed the
right side colon,
right hemicolectomy, they called
it, that's what I remember.
And they found
that the cancer had
spread to the small intestines.
And they took out 18 inches
of my small intestines.
And because of the surgery,
of the bowel resection,
for four more times I had
to go to the hospital,
because I was not doing
well on the three Ps.
Bowel obstruction.
And they gave me a diagnosis
of stage three cancer.
And they said I had to do
chemotherapy for six months.
And because of that, I
developed peripheral neuropathy.
And when I'm trying
to highlight,
you will see my hand's shaking.
It's not because I'm scared.
[laughter]
It's because of my
peripheral neuropathy.
So, I think I'm handling the
physical issues fairly well.
You can see me alive
and whole here.
But it's the talk about
disability and cancer
that I find challenging,
because it's
constructing an identity for
me that I always struggle with.
So, when I returned
from the hospital,
a lot of my
international students--
especially the East
Asian ones-- they
were very parental with me.
They wanted to protect
me and make me feel nice.
Especially the Chinese students.
They said, Professor
Canagarajah, you
shouldn't eat candy, because
it's sugar that causes cancer.
[laughter]
And then some said,
Professor Canagarajah,
you're working too hard.
You need to sleep well.
And then others who
said, no, Professor,
Canagarajah it's not about you.
Somebody in your
family had cancer.
It's all about genetics.
My answer for all these
suggestions is a firm, no.
Nobody in my family, as far as
I can remember, has had cancer.
I hate candy.
[laughter]
And I sleep extremely
well, like a baby.
But I started feeling
guilty, and started
doing internet
research, because I
was wondering what did I do
wrong to deserve this disease?
Somebody found my
digital footprint,
and they wanted to
help me uninvited.
So, soon, one day, I had
a dozen emails like this.
Basically, they wanted me to
make an informed decision,
whether I wanted
cremation or burial.
[laughter]
But now, there were others
who were even more helpful,
because without big cash,
you can't make this decision.
So they added another
dozen emails later,
selling me burial insurance.
So there it is.
So imagine waking up
every day, even now,
and opening your inbox, and
seeing 12 messages like this.
Whoever is sending this
seems to be saying,
"Dude, you're still there?
What's wrong with you?
You said you were
dying five years ago."
[laughter]
So, for a few days I sat looking
at the ceiling in my hospital--
moping at the ceiling
and planning my funeral.
But then I got bored.
Then I got bored.
That's when I remembered I had
sent an article to the Journal
of Second Language Writing,
and they had sent me
three challenging reviews.
Earlier, thinking it
was appendix surgery,
I had thought I'd
go to the hospital,
I'd come back, and
start revisions.
But now it looked
like my life was going
to revolve around hospitals.
So I said, I need
to get started,
and I was just going to do it.
So if you see the
small print here,
the article was published.
And what it says is,
revisions received--
you see my hand shaking, right?
Revisions received,
1 September, 2014.
What's interesting is,
it was on July 16, 2014
that I had the major
surgery, bowel resection.
I'm surprised that I
could do so much work.
And I always ask myself how
did I manage the revisions?
So I think this
is what happened.
[laughter]
I had stitches or
sutures all over my body.
I couldn't move.
That's when I realized what a
great invention the ten inch
Dell mini computer is.
[laughter]
I'd never used it.
Penn State had given it to me.
It was lying in my home.
But now, on my bed, I
could keep it with me
and connect to the internet.
I could call up all the
revisions through the web,
I mean the reviewer comments,
start working on the revisions,
and write.
But I made other adjustments,
because they gave me
oxycodone for pain
management, and that
would make me a zombie.
I can't work with that.
So I found that if I listened
carefully to my body,
there were particular postures
where I didn't feel the pain.
It was in nighttime that
I felt the pain a lot,
because I would twist and
turn, and hurt myself.
So I started playing
a game with my nurses.
They would come in the
morning and say, what's
your pain level, one to 10?
And I would say, two, three.
They said, no oxycodone
for you today.
So I said, thank you, and
start doing the revisions.
Then at nighttime
they would come,
and I would say, nine, 10.
[laughter]
Then they gave me a good dose of
oxycodone, and I'd fall asleep,
and wake up next
morning for work.
I started reconfiguring my
environment to my advantage.
Well, contrary to what
the doctors told me,
I didn't tell the
head of department
I was not going to
teach in fall semester.
And how I managed the chemo was,
I scheduled it on Thursdays.
I would have to be in the
hospital for six hours
with one drug.
And then they'd
send me back home
with another drug, which has
to be with me for two days.
On Sunday they
removed the drug--
they unplugged me.
And then Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday I'd teach.
I never missed a single class.
On top of that, I found
that the chemo time
is a good time for
interviews, in two
committees I was serving.
[laughter]
Six hours.
So, I was in a committee
for new PhD students,
and also in a committee for
an instructor for writing.
So what I found
was, that's when I
found this other great
invention, called the iPad.
It doubles up as a
communication medium.
And not just a reading device.
So I'd switch on the
Zoom, or Skype, but I
don't hook the video,
because I don't want
to scare off the candidates--
[laughter]
by showing them all of the
IV tubes running around me.
So I switch the audio.
I'd put on a bass, gruff voice,
and harangue the candidates.
[laughter]
I have found even
the iPad gives me
a new identity that kind of
hides all my vulnerability,
and whatever was
going on in the room.
So I realized the
power of objects
in reshaping my identity.
Prosthetics is a wonderful word.
It basically shows how
objects become you.
They augment you.
They're not separate
detached objects.
They add to our voice.
Can I say?
Also, as I told
you earlier, I also
reconfigured my environment.
I'm here within the four
walls of the hospital room,
but I'm playing
with my medication,
in scheduling, my writing.
And I always write
on my desktop.
But now I had to write on
the bed, which is unheard of.
So I found later that this
article in the Journal Second
Language Writing, won the
award for the best article
for that year.
Thank god they didn't know
that the revisions were coming
from ICUs and cancer
wards, or they
wouldn't have considered me.
So in a lot of ways, I
used objects and ecology
to manage the impairment in my
body, and go ahead with work.
But what I soon realized was
the impaired body can, itself,
do a lot of thinking.
The body doesn't have to
be suppressed or hidden.
Let it flourish.
This I realized, in the
second project I undertook.
Before going for my
appendiceal surgery,
I was asked by the editors of
TQ (I think one of them is here,
Brian Paltridge) who had said,
the 50th anniversary issue
for the TQ is going to
be published in 2016
--the fiftieth anniversary
of the organization--
and we were
wondering whether you
can do a review of the
journal for 50 years,
and also the organization
for 50 years.
And also, they said, this has
to be 8,500 words, 18 pages.
So I was kind of
chuckling to myself
and saying, "yeah, I'll write
some stories, over a bottle
of wine, and give it a fancy
title like autoethnography,
or something."
How are you going to review 50
years of progress in 18 pages,
right?
But here, in the
hospital, I wised up.
And what I found was,
now I can't move.
And I had my 10 inch laptop
connected to the internet.
And I can get all the 50 years
worth of TQ issues, right there
on the bed.
I could code them for
the different theories,
different methods of authors.
I can cut and paste
right there in my draft.
I thought of myself
as a corpus analyst.
Now, always, in my life, I
had thought corpus research
is the most boring research.
[laughter]
I know I'm hurting the
feelings of some people here.
I'm sorry.
But I always thought of myself
as the macho ethnographer,
who loves the deep
art of hanging out.
You have heard that
definition of ethnography
as the deep art of hanging out?
But now I can't hang
out, because there
are these stitches
all over my body.
So I adopted a new method here,
from sheer pain and impairment.
And then I was already motivated
by my impending mortality.
I thought if the doctors say I
may not be able to work long,
and it is a very aggressive
form of cancer, what
about this as my last project?
People will say, You
know, Canagarajah
wrote this wonderful
piece of history,
and then he faded away."
[laughter]
So, not a bad ending.
So, I wasn't sure
how this new research
was coming out, with me fighting
with oxycodone and writing it.
But the reviewers were very
impressed, to my surprise.
Both of them, they
said things like this.
"This paper is an
impressive achievement.
I came to it a bit skeptically,
thinking it would never
be able to cover what it
claims to do, and if it did so,
would be so dense it would
be largely unreadable."
Because it's 18 pages for
50 years worth of research.
So that's when I
thought I should
let these poor souls know where
this impressive research was
coming from.
By the way, I don't think you
can read this acknowledgement.
I said, "thanks to this project.
I coped well with my diagnosis
and treatment of cancer
in summer and fall of 2014.
The time in hospitals for
major rounds of surgery
and chemotherapy
gave me the patience
to do the required research
and writing efficiently."
I truly believe this
is embodied research.
It's my body speaking,
body motivating me.
So other people have
started talking about it,
and this is postcolonial
scholar Walter Mignolo
who said, even our racialized
body thinks differently
and adds to our work.
But for disability scholars,
it means something special,
because their body is in pain.
So should pain in the body
be acknowledged, invited,
in the work you do?
We don't talk about
pain in research,
because that would
show us as vulnerable.
We want to be always in
control in our research.
So Rosemarie
Garland-Thompson, who
has disfigured hands,
both hands, congenitally,
she engages with
feminist theory.
And feminist scholars talk
about standpoint theory.
It might be translated as,
identity as epistemology.
You think, produce knowledge,
from where you stand.
And for people who are disabled,
they are not standing, even.
They are either
in hospital beds,
or in crutches,
or in wheelchairs.
So she coins the
term sitpoint theory,
to play with standpoint theory,
to acknowledge vulnerability
and pain in research.
So I don't want to
give the impression
that I, through just sheer
bent of my willpower,
I transcended my pain,
overcame my vulnerability,
and started being productive.
I was actually a picture
of abject helplessness
in the hospital.
I couldn't even go to
the bathroom by myself.
And my three Ps-- you know,
you see this nurse checking
for activity in the
three Ps front--
any bowel movement, any noise,
I had to depend on people.
So that's when I realized,
there are two forms
of health-care workers.
One group says, these are
transactional relationships
with you.
You bring the big
bucks, I get paid.
We both have our mutual
rights and obligations,
and we'll engage in this way.
That's part of our work.
But then there's the
people like this--
this is one of the nurses--
who consider this as
more than transactional.
It was an ethical
relationship for her.
Basically, what she was
doing was in these situations
she would have
conversations with me.
Her father had a
type of colon cancer.
And she was telling
me stories about what
he was doing at home to
get his three Ps going.
Homemade remedies,
things he drinks.
Now, at this point, I'm
in Pittsburgh, UPMC.
The world's best place
for appendiceal cancer.
If you ever-- no, no,
I won't even say it.
[laughter]
If you have appendiceal
cancer you have to go there,
I was going to say.
So she has seen
all of the patients
from all over the
world coming here.
So she used to tell
me stories about how
I'm doing, in relation to
other people she has met.
So, she went over and beyond her
work, to make friends with me,
to become personal with me.
And I realized the same
thing in my research.
In the article that I showed
you from TESOL Quarterly,
I used to email my students, and
they would draw these diagrams
for me.
Actually, they sent
it to me color.
But TQ, you know, like
all Journals these days,
they don't publish
them in color.
So earlier, I thought
I'd write the article,
and then add these on, these
images to illustrate them.
When I got the images,
what I found was
I was doing a lot of
rethinking, because I
could see certain patterns
much more clearly.
So it turned out to be
a kind of a distributed
practice, between me
writing, their imagination,
with different colors, different
diagrams, and the visual
shaping my argument.
I had to rewrite a lot.
That's when I
started wondering, is
it fair to just put my
name as the author, when
this is a case of
distributed activity,
between a lot of people.
So a lot of scholars--
and this is Tobin Siebers.
He's mobility impaired.
He had polio all his life.
He argues, we have to
think of the human society
as a community of
dependent frail bodies.
What a term.
How is that different from
community of practice, speech
community, discourse community?
It brings the body
in, but in pain.
And then he quickly
says, it is not
because I'm saying you have
to be sorry for the disabled.
The structure of dependence
is inherent to all society.
So we will mull on that.
But what I'm going to do is--
from the hospital, I used
to write my cancer diaries
to my friends and relatives.
All the stories about 3Ps,
and other body fluids--
blood, white cells, red cells.
You know the story
of chemo drugs.
But I'm not going
to do that today.
Thank god, right?
You have had enough of that.
So, It's going to be an
academic cancer diary for you.
With a lot of my fellow
cancer diagnosees,
we share, a lot of terms.
We become socialized into our
words, like hemicolectomy.
But one of the other
shared terms is BC/AC.
Before cancer, after
cancer, and how our life
changes after the diagnosis.
I think there's a BC/AC
for my academic life.
To begin with, I got interested
in Disability Studies.
But Disability Studies is not
new in applied linguistics.
This is my good friend
Vaidehi Ramanathan, who
published this book in 2009.
And this poor lady, she
autographed it personally,
put it in the mail.
It came home.
And you know what I did?
I just threw it into my
bookshelf of unread books,
because I said, "Disability
studies is for losers.
It's not for me."
True.
And do you know what happened
after I came from the hospital?
This is the first book
I got out after surgery
and started reading.
I was invested now, in
trying to understand
how disabled people live.
As an academic, I could have
read so many other books.
But I started with a
book of this nature.
By the way, this cover is a kind
of interesting theme, or meme.
You know, a lot of disabled
people are modeling.
And you can see the play
with Victoria's Secret here.
So, this is one way in which the
disabled are being empowered.
They're using symbolic resources
to reconstruct their identity.
So starting with this book,
I went into a lot of books
in our field, and in
Rhetoric and composition.
And I saw that they are making
an important paradigm shift.
For the medical
model of disability
it's a physical problem.
It's a deficit that
needs to be redressed
by the doctor, if possible.
But the other
orientation to disability
that a lot of rhetoricians
and applied linguists
are interested in
is how disability
is socially constructed, and
linguistically constructed.
It's talk that makes us
either look like second class
citizens, or empowered, like
the model there, to look at us
or represent
ourselves differently.
So Vaidehi Ramanathan
and McPherron,
in their second book--
They say their book is about
how bodies get languaged.
Because going all the way
from Judith Butler and others,
we know that the body doesn't
have identity written on it.
It's discourse that
construct identities,
like sexual orientation,
gender, and even race.
So here's a Norwegian
applied linguist
who we don't meet
here too often,
Jan Grue, who is paraplegic,
he is in a wheelchair.
He talks about how language is
central to disability studies
and why we in our
profession should
be concerned about
the interconnection
between language and disability.
From there on, I progressed
to fields outside ours,
in humanities and
social sciences.
And I found that there is
another major shift taking
place in the disabilities
studies movement.
They would call it critical
disability studies.
And what these scholars
argue is disability studies
is not about disability.
It's about ability.
How do we talk about ability?
And from that point of view, it
is very central to competence.
So, we already talked about
the ideology of the ableism
as a central
construct that makes
us look at people differently.
And to sum it up, it's like
ability is the universal norm
of being human.
If you are disabled, it's a
personal individual problem.
It's a deficit.
The faster you get
out of your disability
and act like all of us as able
people, the better for you.
If not, you're a
second-class citizen.
Now, what the critical
disability scholars argue is,
we are all disabled.
Disability is the
norm, not Ability.
Think about it.
We all get old.
We will get impaired.
We will die.
By the way, I will die five
or 10 years before you,
but you will soon follow,
so don't feel sorry for me.
[laughter]
That's right, that's what I
always keep telling myself.
OK, I will die before you.
No big deal.
OK, but some might
even put it this way.
it's not that we are all able.
We are all relatively
able bodied.
Or even better, we are
all only relatively able.
Or even better, we are
all relatively abnormal.
But it's the ideology
of ability that
makes us not acknowledge that.
If you're wearing
glasses, do you
call yourself visually impaired?
There are all kinds
of impairment,
but we don't think about them.
We're thinking about all those
other guys in wheelchairs
or in crutches as
disabled, right?
So, Garland-Thomson extends
this to say even the project,
the vision for the disabled is
not to transcend disability,
but how to embrace disability.
Because a lot of them
won't have any cure.
The doctors always tell me,
during every 6 month visit,
"This thing will
always come back.
But don't worry.
Even if this comes back,
we will wheel you in
and get to work quickly."
You know, the part about
wheeling me in on a gurney
is supposed to cheer me up.
[laughter]
But that's what they
keep telling me.
They moved from 80/20 it
will come back, to 50/50,
and that was supposed
to be good news.
So, the project the
vision for the disabled
is not to look for cure,
because a lot of them, they
can't expect that.
But that's what all
of us are doing.
We live with our impairment,
except that we don't
recognize this all the time.
So, this is the
critical question
that critical disabilities
studies is asking.
How do we define ability?
And to make a long
story short, I
illustrated these four
points through my narrative
in the opening, right?
How I became able in the
hospital, is first of all,
I reconfigured my environment--
my work schedule, my time space
dimension, the objects I had.
I networked with other
people and engaged
in distributed practice.
I got objects to work with me.
I allowed my body to think
when my mind was on oxycodone.
So, a lot of
scholars have talked
about each of those features.
I won't go into them.
We don't have time.
But I want to quickly
move on to an example
from applied linguistics.
I'm going draw from Chuck
Goodwin, who is in UCLA,
and has talked a lot
about his father, Chil,
and how they communicate.
He has usually
done this analysis
as an extension of
conversation analysis, CA,
and embodied CA, et cetera.
But there are
implications for ability,
about philosophical issues,
or what it means to be human.
So, Chil had some
kind of a stroke
when he was 65 years old.
And he's left with three
words-- yes, no, and.
And also a lot of baby
sounds like duh duh dee.
But he can communicate fine,
because, as you can see,
his gaze points to
who he is talking to,
who needs the new information.
He latches on his three
words to other people's talk.
He uses the objects
in his environment,
by pointing them or holding
them, to communicate.
So we can say one of
two things about Chil.
Either Chil is disabled and
linguistically incompetent.
He has only three
words, and baby sounds.
Or we can say, Chil is able,
if you consider the fact
that he is using the
body, the environment,
and social networks
to communicate.
So this is going to
be a long project,
but what I'm going to do at the
end of this talk is to tell you
we are all like Chil.
If you define
competence differently.
Or you are all on
Oxycodone or something.
I was going to say that's the
ideology of ableism that's
taking us in a
different direction.
Let's try.
But all this
depends on a big if.
If Chuck and his sister
Pat collaborate with him,
Chil is communicative.
If they sit on their
haunches and say,
"Mister, it's your
responsibility
to make yourself understood,
we are not going to help you,"
then Chil will be impaired.
So, one of my favorite rhetoric
scholars, Krista Ratcliffe,
has coined the term
rhetorical listening.
And what she says is,
we teach our students
how to speak, but not to listen.
We are not talking
about hearing,
hearing is a physical activity.
Listening means an ethical
and social activity.
How do you collaborate
with others?
So, we'll see how this, in
critical disability studies
is one of the major
shifts that took place.
Early disability studies
talks about the rights
of the disabled.
How do we reconfigure the
environment to suit them?
But critical disability
studies talks about ethics.
What is the point of saying nice
things about Chil if we are not
going to collaborate with him?
It's not really helping.
You need to work ethically
to make a difference for him.
And another shift
I want to point out
is Vaidehi Ramanathan and
McPherron talk about how
the body is languaged.
Critical disability scholars
say the body is languaging.
The body is also
communicating and thinking.
And that's a major
shift for me, also.
Before cancer, I would
have called myself
a social constructionist.
I gave a lot of importance
to language and discourse.
And later I said, language
mediates social reality,
physical reality, and
makes us orientate to it
in a particular way.
Now I feel I gave too much
importance to language.
Language works with a lot
of other material and bodily
resources to communicate.
And there's another
big shift taking place.
I was all for
agency in the past.
I would say, students can be
taught to critically think,
to engage in critical
pedagogy and they
can transform the world.
Now I think we are connected
to others, the environment,
the material world,
and the objects--
and that agency has
to be reconsidered--
how we work with that.
So let me quickly
illustrate how this has made
a difference in my thinking.
This is the first
article I published
after I came from Sri
Lanka to the United States
in August of 1994.
This article was published in
1996, in Written Communication.
And I was talking
about how I felt
excluded from
publishing networks
while I was in Sri Lanka.
I didn't have electricity.
I didn't have
laptops, computers.
I didn't have the
latest literature.
So every time I sent an article
to a lot of good journals here,
they would say, hey, that's
an interesting study,
but you are not
using our language.
You are not using our theories.
Do you know, within
the last three months
there have all these famous
articles that appeared.
I would never read that
for the next 10 years.
So I wanted to
ask, is this fair,
to exclude my research because
I don't know your language?
The response was interesting.
This is one of the reviewers
and what this person is broadly
saying is "Listen,
Mister, in order
to construct
knowledge together, we
need to have one conversation.
You can't have a
conversation in Sri Lanka,
and somebody has a
conversation somewhere else.
And that's not the way
we develop our field.
We all have to work together."
And so he concludes
(I am thinking
of the reviewer as a he.)
He concludes by saying,
the field doesn't
give set asides.
"You're competing for
the centralization
of knowledge for excellence.
Come, fight with us.
So show your good research.
You have a good argument.
You can write well.
If you can do these
you can participate
in knowledge construction."
By the way, he or she
adopts a nice metaphor
from American affirmative
action movements
that I didn't appreciate
at that point.
Now I understand better.
This person is saying,
We are not going to say,
two articles for
those poor Sri Lankans
there, two articles for
those Nigerians there.
The rest is for us, right?
No set asides here, they said.
So I kind of approached
this very gingerly
and after a lot of revisions,
concluded by saying,
"This essay is not just
another by the materially
underprivileged seeking
set asides, neither is it
a plea to overlook of
excellence to provide greater
representation for
periphery scholars in center
publications.
Rather, this article
is an attempt
to deconstruct the
bases of excellence
in published scholarship".
I am making a similar move that
critical disability scholars
were making.
It's not about making you
feel good about the disabled.
It's about questioning ability.
So that was good enough
to get me published.
But now, after cancer, I'm
thinking of my argument
slightly differently.
First of all, I appreciate
an important point.
That is, do you see that the
reviewer is trying to tell me
you're excluded, not
because you're in Sri Lanka,
you're a non-native speaker
of English, or anything.
You are just not able, mister.
Come on, fight with me.
Show you are able.
Show you are excellent.
Can you see how the
identity of ability
is used to marginalize
other identities?
So, a lot of people have started
arguing that disability is
the mother of all identities.
It's so central.
It can be used to
marginalize anyone--
for sexual orientation,
gender, race-- to say,
it's not about your gender.
It's not about your race.
You're just not able.
So I appreciate this point now.
I didn't earlier.
But I fell into this trap.
And what I argued in reverse
was, I'm able like you.
It's just the discourses
that are different.
It's just the ideologies
that are different.
If only the discourses
were different,
you will see how
I'm able, mister.
So I think what I didn't
acknowledge was, in Sri Lanka,
I was limited.
I was impaired, without
resources for research.
That actually creates
a lot of insights
into how knowledge works in
a lot of disciplines that
have stayed on with
me, that have shaped me
into a scholar in this field.
My experiences trying to publish
and do research from Sri Lanka.
I should have said, yeah,
when I wrote this thing.
I was in pain, I
was disappointed.
But it produced new knowledge.
Right?
But another mistake I
made, I think, the reviewer
is understanding me as
saying, give me my rights.
Give me a space for my
representation in this field.
Don't you want a Sri Lankan
to publish his research
in your journal?
I wonder if it would be
a better argument to say,
it's not about me.
It's about us.
Do you feel comfortable
and happy making knowledge
without me joining
in the conversation?
So, I should have brought more
of the relational ethics there.
So Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom,
wrote an interesting op-ed
in The Guardian recently.
She said, after about 50
years of identity politics,
we are worse off than ever.
We are polarized in the United
States, divided in Europe,
everywhere.
And what went wrong?
I think one thing
that went wrong
is we didn't develop an
ethic of co-existence.
We're all trapped in our
ghettos, (shall I say?),
our own communities,
own identities,
including my neighbors
in Pennsylvania
who are working in
coal mines and doing
a lot of other things.
They also want their
rights and identity.
We haven't really learned
how to live together.
But as I think more about
co-existence, relationality,
how my identity is connected
with people and things,
I'm also finding, this is
what people in South Asia
said thousands of years ago.
I ran away from all this in
order to satisfy the reviewers
and show that I am good in
the western forms of thinking.
So this is a Zoe Todd, a Native
American feminist scholar
who said, how ironic
it is we are now
cheering post-humanism and
new materialism, actor network
theory, etc., when
people in her community
articulated these
things millennia ago.
So it was kind of
deja vu for me.
So, the disabled
identity didn't just
add something new to
what I already had
multilingual, nonnative, Asian.
It reconfigured my
identities, repositioned me
in the academic community.
So, thank God, I came
to this realization
through stays in
hospital wards and ICUs,
it's my sit point thinking.
But all the heroes of mine that
I quoted before, all of them
are disabled in some form.
And Tobin Siebers, who
worked in Ann Arbor,
and who passed away about
two or three years ago,
said when the disabled engage in
scholarship, it's not stories,
they are theories.
Actually, critical theories.
Because from their
wheelchair or crutches,
they are developing
a perspective
into the world that's very
critical of what's going on.
So that's why I'm kind of
obsessed with cancer narratives
and diaries these days.
Because from the
edge of mortality
people are thinking
critically about things.
And here are some
famous cancer diarists.
Sontag who writes about
metaphors of illness,
Lorde who discusses activism,
and of course recently
Jenny Diske on creativity
and the life of a writer.
But there is an
everydayness to this genre.
It's not only these famous
people who write like this.
There are ordinary people who
are writing their diaries.
And I go to CaringBridge,
free registration,
and I read the stories and blogs
of about four or five people.
Let me quickly--
I want to do some data
analysis about the new research
I am doing after cancer.
But I have to tell you
the story of John Roe.
I met John in Pennsylvania,
in Penn State, when
I moved there in 2007 Fall.
John had, himself,
moved from England.
And he said, well--
I met him in a church--
and he said, well,
it might take time to
adjust to a new environment.
And if you want to talk,
come over to my office.
So I went on Wednesdays at noon,
I walked to McAlister building,
where the math
department is located,
and we met and did
what Christians
do-- read the scripture,
meditated, reflected, prayed.
But after a while
I thought, hey,
Penn State is treating me nice.
My department has given me
so many awards, I am a star.
I don't need John's
prayers anymore.
I was wrong.
So, last fall, I did one of
my annual fall rituals, which
is, on a Sunday
afternoon after church,
I need to make a nice walk
in the Penn State Arboretum.
It's dressed gloriously with
fall foliage and fall colors.
And who do I see
walking in front of me
on crutches, but John Roe.
We got into talking,
and we found
that we were both diagnosed with
cancer at the same time, spring
of 2014.
And unfortunately for him,
it returned two years later.
So before he hobbled on,
John told me, "OK, both of us
are now in a club that no one
likes to join," and went away.
I quickly reconnected with him
and started reading his blogs.
And this is on October 1.
By the way, it's very personal,
and I asked John for permission
to show this to you.
But what I see is it's
illustrating the same points
I just made all along.
First of all, look at his faith,
and courage, and good humor.
He is announcing "We
have stopped treatment."
They went for hospice
care, palliative care.
He uses the metaphor
hide and seek
to say cancer has come
back, ready or not.
But he goes on to say, hospice
care, or palliative care,
is not a matter of giving up.
It is not the end is night.
It's not, just let
nature take its course.
Hospice care focuses on
living your best life now."
How can somebody say that?
Living your best life now?
If you'll read the rest,
what you're going to find
is he is reconfiguring his
ecology, his environment,
to suit his body and
its altered condition.
Disability is actually a
gap between the environment
and you. if you will change
that gap, your quality of life
returns.
So, as a proof of this, John
is still intellectually active.
So here is another blog
titled "Points of inflection."
Point of inflection is the point
at which an equation changes
character or becomes another.
So he is using this as
a metaphor for the way
the world changes
when we human beings
are no longer a physically
small disturbance
on the surface of nature, but
have become the main event.
You know what he's
saying, right?
He's talking about
the Anthropocene.
And he has started a new
project, a new book that he
started working on with two
of his graduate students,
titled Math for Sustainability.
So I started interviewing
him by email,
and asked, what about
this new project
you have started taking?
And he said, "I had already felt
a calling for sustainability
work before the diagnosis.
Knowing that I had cancer
confirmed that sense of calling
and pushed me to bring
the book to fruition -
especially after I learned
(remember this is some years
past diagnosis and apparently
successful treatment)
that I had metastatic
disease and was
going to die relatively soon."
"I selfishly pray
that I'd like to hold
a printed copy in
my hands, but that
doesn't seem as likely now."
I think this reflects
embodied thinking
in the sense of
urgency and motivation
to get this work done.
But it gets better.
As he goes further, he says,
"the cancer/ growth metaphor is
so obvious and so thought
provoking, both at once,
that my health situation
certainly energized my work
on the book, and also confirmed
the feeling that this was,
in some sense, my
legacy project."
And he has explained these
two metaphors in other places.
Just as in cancer the bad
cells overtake the good cells,
in the environment pollution is
doing a lot of damage and just
as there is unrestricted,
unrestrained growth,
because of capitalism
and materialism--
and we have talked
a lot about that--
We are destroying nature.
So this is his sitpoint
thinking inspired
by all these great
scholars that I
see before me, I want
to conclude by offering
my sitpoint thinking to you.
My research lately has been
making me rethink competence.
If you look carefully,
the notion of competence
is informed through and through
with an ideology of ableism.
Our project as
teachers and scholars
is to arm our students
with the mastery
of finite grammatical
knowledge, so that they
can produce infinite
sentences in infinite context
in performance.
That is unsustainable.
Jan Blommaert and
others have said
that for the hallmark of
globalization, mobility, et
cetera is unpredictability.
So one day, you
and your students
are having a conversation,
and in walks a Sri Lankan
with this weird accent.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
Your knowledge is
not enough for you.
You need other resources.
Others have critiqued
competence for other reasons.
And what Alison Phipps says
is, the notion of competence,
the mastery of
competence, as the mastery
of grammatical
knowledge makes us
ignore a lot of
other capabilities
we need for communication
and interaction.
So, she has a lot of
interesting stories here.
One of them is she was adopting
her daughter from Ethiopia,
and the British home office
declined or rejected the appeal
for asylum, so she was
going to be sent back.
Here she is, she doesn't know
Amhrric like her daughter.
Her daughter doesn't
know English.
And how are they negotiating
this very stressful situation?
There was communication
beyond words.
And so what she goes on to
talk about in this articles is,
"the strength of
competency concept
makes us ignore a lot other
capabilities and resources."
She uses the word capability
here, capability there,
to say there are a
lot of other resources
that are required
for competence.
She gives you a sense of
these in this quotation.
Corporeality of address,
capability of patience,
observation, sensory dimensions.
We lose focus on all
those kinds of things.
She prefers capability as a
alternative for competence.
This is almost the same--
so, it does make a difference
to say I am capable of doing
something, rather than,
I am competent in
doing something, right?
I'm capable of something
here, not there.
I'm capable of
this, but not you.
You might be capable
of other things.
It's similar to the
other move I made earlier
in one of the slides.
I said, not disabled,
but differently abled.
Unfortunately, for critical
disability studies,
this shift is not enough.
Both disabled to differently
abled and competence
to capability, still
focus on the individual.
It's about me.
But what they would say
is, it is not about me.
It's about the social networks,
the ecological resources.
How do we locate
ourselves in that?
So, these days, I'm
thinking, after cancer,
that a better alternative
might be emplacement.
Basically, what it means
is, how we are attuned--
or how we communicate
in attunement
with social networks
and material networks
in which we are placed?
But I think the big
fear all of us have is
where is human agency?
Where is me?
Am I lost in all
these resources?
--which doesn't have to be.
So, what I did is when
I was in the hospital--
within the four walls of the
hospital with sutures all over
my body--
I repositioned myself in
a way, to my advantage,
to be productive.
Somebody else could have
positioned themselves
not to be productive.
It's a choice.
So, repositioning is good
enough for me as agency.
That's all we can expect.
In the context of all
the resources around us,
how do we situate ourselves?
So, let me conclude
with the research
that I am doing these days.
I'm doing a lot of
observations and interviews
with international
STEM scholars.
And a lot of them
chuckle as they tell me
"I'm not good in English."
But they're able to say it
confidently, and sometimes
cynically, because they
know they're successful,
because they have
emplaced themselves
in a lot of other resources
that are available to them.
But I'm going to tell
you the story of Jihun.
He's from South Korea.
He did all his academic
work, including
his PhD, in South Korea.
So he's a post doc in
microbiology at Penn State.
So this is the first time
he's in an English-dominant
environment, in his career.
So he's unlike a lot of other
international STEM scholars
I talked to, in being much
more deferential and diffident.
And he talks about, "I'm nervous
when I go to conferences.
I wish I had more
spoken language."
So, he thinks that
he's not good.
He needs to work hard.
So, after cancer, I'm
also treating my research
"subjects"-- a word that
I've stopped using--
as full-bodied individuals.
And I'm beginning to get
to know them as people.
And there are a lot of
other vulnerabilities
that Jihun faces.
One of them is living
from grant to grant.
And this is a story that he
tells how his PI was putting
pressure on him to finish
an article intended
for publication so that
they can renew the grant,
or write a nice report by
saying how successful he was.
And he uses the
word-- you might say
it's bad English--
this experience could
"affect my destiny."
But it's profoundly true.
If they don't get
the grant, he had
to pack off, back to his home
country with his wife and son,
and it would be a
different life thereafter.
On top of that, his wife
has been fighting depression
for about six or seven years.
So he has to take
care of the family.
She is unable to do anything.
And also, his 10-year-old son.
On top of that, he's
moonlighting as a translator.
On the internet he gets essays
from South Korea in Korean,
and he translates it in
English, sends it back.
So the obvious question
is, "how do you work?
How are you productive?"
And what he said is, actually,
"all this anxiety and all
this pressure has made
me schedule my work
in a very efficient way.
I look at the priorities
more clearly."
And this is a nice narrative.
I wish I could play the
audio, but I won't have time.
He speaks very slowly.
It's a nice story about how
he did a piece of research,
and experiment, and sent
the details or the steps
to their collaborators in
the University of Virginia.
And they followed
the same steps,
but they couldn't
find the results.
So they were suspecting that
his research is not valid.
But they came to Penn State,
and he did the research.
And this is priceless.
They said discovering and
coming up with the conclusion.
And one of them
said, "OK, I got it.
That's a human factor."
You know what they're
saying is Jihun
doing the research is different
from them doing the research
in the University of Virginia.
That's a very
interesting insight.
So, this is sit point
thinking, under pressure--
actually, that's what he
goes on to talk about.
He doesn't give up.
He's very persistent because
of the pressures he has.
So, he's not only
using his environment
in very effective ways, halfway
through some of the interviews,
he used the analogy
of recipe cooking.
His research is like cooking.
Just as in cooking,
you have a recipe.
He has a recipe for his
studies, his research.
And what he said is, I write
my recipe before the end
of the day, put it on
the desk behind me,
so that next morning, when
I come, I know what to cook,
you know in his experiments.
But then he goes on to say,
how he has a lot of chemicals
that he uses.
They come with small labels.
He changed the labels
to big letters.
And also arranged it in a
particular way on the shelves
behind him so that it's
convenient for his research.
One other thing
he says is, he has
to prepare a gel before he
does his research on DNA.
But he found, through
a lot of research,
that this gel is available.
He doesn't have to do it for
one whole day or two days.
So, he started using it
and made a special case
with his PI to buy it.
It transformed his research.
So, another question
I had for him, is,
we have a state-of-the-art
"millennial complex"
in our university.
And I said, would you like
to go there, because it
will make you more efficient?
He said, no, because
this ecology has
been shaped for my purposes.
I'd rather be here, rather than
go to a state-of-the-art place.
So, he also uses objects
very effectively.
And I'm going to illustrate
it through the most unexpected
example--
writing as an object.
So, what he's doing is
-Jihun is the lead author
in this article.
And I have actually summarized,
or bring in one screen
the three pages of
his first draft.
You can't see it, not a problem,
because all that
I wanted to show
is that this is his first draft.
It shows something about
his writing process.
What he does is, he
has all these titles,
like introduction, result,
discussion, materials
and method,
acknowledgement, references.
And first he starts writing
methods and materials,
partly because it's
readily available.
It's from another
paper from their team.
Another lead author who
had something there.
He's making minor modifications.
You might call this kind of
a product oriented writing,
but I'm going to say good
things about this writing,
much to the chagrin
of writing scholars.
[laughter]
So, one of the things
is, although he is,
writing as if he is
fixing verbal resources
in particular
places of the text,
it's generating a
lot of thinking.
So, in this case, when he
puts all this information,
his PI is saying, this
needs cleaning up.
Should we really need
to place this here?
(I'm sorry you can't
see it all there).
And what Jihun says is,
this is what this other team
did in this paper.
These are the steps.
So can you see?
Though Jihun says
I'm bad in English,
He is fighting back with his PI.
The object gives him the
confidence to talk back.
Or here, another of their
teammates, an Indian Chemistry
associate professor
says, I don't think
this section belongs here.
And he says, this is the
format of Plant Physiology.
From the paper that he's
using the for the format,
the template.
So, this is what he said.
And then when they see their
information put together
in their particular places--
these are the materials,
and images, the PI has questions
about certain connections that
they have--
how the visuals and the
description go together.
He's saying, "I am
doing this research."
"I will do this research again."
You know, what's
happening is, it's
not a case of
research comes first,
then writing comes later.
Writing as an
artifact comes first,
and research sometimes
follows after that.
So there's still a lot of
generation of new thinking,
new work going on.
So, I have talked about how
this postdoc from South Korea
works with - as you can
see from the title page--
there are people from Sweden,
from other universities
in the United States
and Australia.
How do these people
work together?
I think in the
last year's plenary
I talked about the
networking that was going on
and the social practice.
But I want to talk about
something different.
I want to talk
about the way they
work in relation to a more
difficult, more challenging
situation.
How do they talk together
as a social practice?
So, what is complicated
about this is,
while Jihun says
he's bad in English,
he has to actually
talk with a PI who's
Anglo-American, a graduate
student from Ireland,
and another post-doc from China.
There's an interesting
story here.
When I sent the IRB to
the whole team, and said
I want to videotape you.
And they OKed.
You know, Jihun is
the focal participant,
but you will be
all in the video.
The PI said, "why are
they studying you?
You're not bad in English.
Maybe the Chinese
post-doc, because she
came more recently."
So, you keep that in mind.
How is it possible that a
research participant who
says I'm bad in English can
be treated as good in English
by his PI?
I'm going to illustrate
the way they work together.
So, there seems to be something
about their language ideology.
And what Jihun says is, we
have some common things,
like a goal.
It helps in a lot of ways.
It helps him unpack
what is unintelligible.
But more importantly, it
makes them work together.
You need the other person, so
you need to work with them.
He goes on to say,
there might be
certain sources of
miscommunication,
but it is sufficient.
We aren't perfect.
But what does that say
about language ideology?
It's very pragmatic, functional.
When we have problems
in understanding--
sometimes I have a problem,
but I know what she meant.
Is extra sensory perception
allowed in applied linguistics?
The words might be
wrong, different,
but I can guess the meaning.
I can intuit the meaning.
Let me show you a clip.
I'm running out of time.
The audio will give
you an insight.
But I do think I could play
this, how they work as a team.
And I have multiple clips here.
I won't show all of them.
But I'll just play maybe
one or two of them.
I just want you to
see, first of all,
how his gestures and a
monitor-- they're always
seated in front of a monitor.
And they're calling up all their
photographs from their results.
The monitor helps in
unpacking language.
So a person like Chil
can still communicate,
because there are a
lot of other resources.
But more importantly, like Chuck
and Pat, Nick is collaborating,
he's listening, he's working.
So watch both of them.
[audio playback]
[end playback]
Yeah.
So one thing you can
see is, he's always
using gestures
accompanying his talk,
and it helps more than him.
First of all, it does help
him, because as you can see,
when he can't find the
word "re-incubated,"
he kind of uses
fingers like that.
And some of our brilliant
graduate students
call this "thinking
with your hands"
Adam Campernolle might be here.
He says how sometimes gestures
help you to find the word,
or clarify an idea.
But more than that,
there is turn after turn
where Jihun is unable
to finish his sentence,
Nick comes to the rescue.
Because he knows, from the
context, from the gestures,
from the visual, what
Jihun is trying to say.
I have a lot or
other clips where
I can show he's not just
filling a deficit, giving
a word he wants, but actually
summing up the conversation.
Gist formulation is
what CA people call it.
He's listening to the
whole conversation
and gives him a word, OK,
this is what's going on.
Sometimes there's upshot.
That is, he describes a
particular series of events.
Oh, the implications are this.
So, he completes the term,
not just by giving a word,
but more than that,
actually listening actively
to carry on the conversation.
[audio playback]
[end playback]
So, one of the things
I also want to show
is there's a lot of deixis
like "this" and "that."
That's fine, right?
You know why?
Because it's all on the monitor.
And also the technical
terms like "histidine."
Here is another place where
Nick rephrases what he said.
Jihun says, "like this",
and spent a couple of turns
describing a process, then Nick
rephrases, "like antibody."
More of antibody.
OK, I wanted to come to this.
As I listen to this-- listen
to what Jihun is doing,
I initially thought that
science scholars work like that.
Not us in the arts.
I write alone.
That's what I thought.
This is me talking in the
tape about this comparison
very early in the conversation.
But that's wrong, because I told
you in one of the early slides,
from the hospital I was engaged
in distributed practice.
What my graduate
students were sending me,
their graphs, their
diagrams, just the visuals
made me think differently.
So, I didn't work alone.
I wish I could show
you the whole tape.
But at the very end
of the conversation,
I've changed my
thinking about this.
And I'm saying, maybe
we're all like that.
And this is like a,
this is last December.
It looks like I'm
brainstorming for this talk.
But what I'm doing
is I'm actually--
"like how you do your, handle,
your objects and ecology,
that's what I did
in the hospital."
So I don't know if you have
time to listen to this.
[audio playback]
[end playback]
I love his
full-throated laughter
about my antics in the hospital.
It looked like this
vulnerable human
being has forgotten what
anxieties he has in order
to keep working.
But you might say, it looks
like-- if that is uptake--
I am changing his views on
language and communication.
This might appear
outrageous, and you
might scold me for that.
A man says, I'm bad in English.
And I'm telling him
that's not the issue.
We are both using ecology,
objects, social networking
to communicate with.
Now, there goes our jobs.
[laughter]
He's not going to come to
our English classes any more.
But even worse, the researcher
starts thinking differently.
He's changing my understanding
of what communication means.
What competence means
in applied linguistics
is shaped by a STEM scholar?
You are going to say
this is going too far.
All that I can say
in my favor is--
maybe, I am doing a different
kind of applied linguistics,
let me call it embodied
applied linguistics.
Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz
wrote an article titled
"Embodied Sociolinguistics."
And they have the first two
bullet points in their article.
I added the last four based
on critical disability studies
and my experiences.
Basically, I'm
thinking of research
as an engagement of
full-bodied people engaging
with others, and
with other bodies,
changing our life circumstances.
So, I do feel inspired all
the time when I come off
an interview with Jihun.
So very appropriately
we meet on Sundays.
It's a day for rest
and reflection.
The reason is that he's doing
his research for all six days,
and he doesn't want me to come
anywhere close to his lab.
But he says, Sundays at
5 o'clock, if you want,
you can come to Wegmans.
That's where we
meet, in the cafe.
[laughter]
So, recently, I was finishing
a conversation with him,
and I said goodnight.
And I just remembered
my wife wanted
me to bring some groceries from
Wegmans, so I started walking.
And I was thinking to myself--
I actually have my tape
recorder that I take with me.
I was kind of
clutching it closely,
and I said, "90 minutes
of wonderful stuff.
I can't wait to go home and
listen if I got everything.
I can't wait to transcribe it."
But then my heart sank,
because the next day,
Monday, I had my periodic
MRIs and CAT scans.
So I said to myself, if they
find cancer, all of this
is going to go to waste.
Honest.
But then I kept on walking
through the aisles in Wegmans.
And then I thought, it's not
the transcription and writing
on high-impact factor
journals that count.
It's this 90 minutes
with this guy.
And what did we do?
Two vulnerable
human beings created
a community of frail bodies,
as Tobin Siebers would say.
Out of this community
we created new knowledge
about how science works,
how communication works.
We created enough meta
knowledge of how each of us
uses objects and ecological
resources in our favor.
We inspired each other to keep
moving despite our frailties.
So, when I thought like that,
I said, well, moments like this
are so rich they are worth
living, however short my life.
But even better, when
I thought like that,
I forgot all about the next
day's CT scans and MRIs.
I just told myself a word that
I usually don't use in public.
It's a new word.
I learned it only
after immigrated
to the United States.
But on this occasion I said
to myself, fuck cancer!
[laughter]
[applause]
