I am a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell.
Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct professor.
Her work includes Open in Emergency, a hybrid book-arts project decolonizing Asian American mental health; the Asian American Tarot, a reimagined deck of tarot cards; and the Open in Emergency Initiative, an ongoing national project developing mental health arts programming with universities and community spaces.
Her new creative-critical, genre-bending book on mental health and a pedagogy of unwellness, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press), is a journey into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.
A Pedagogy of Unwellness
I am a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell.
(I am also a mother. And a daughter. But not that kind of mother and not that kind of daughter.)
I think about—and witness—unwellness for a living. My work asks: What hurts? And how do we go on living while it hurts?
I have worked to develop a pedagogy of unwellness: the radical recognition that we are all differentially unwell. This means we are unwell in different ways at different times, in relation to differentially disabling and enabling structures. I teach, write, and create with the assumption that we are all shaped by structural unwellness and thus move through the world already unwell. My students are unwell. The purpose of the spaces I create is to learn the contours of that unwellness and discover together how to live through it. I create spaces of vulnerability and trust, in the classroom and beyond, by beginning with my own vulnerabilities. The professor is unwell. It is through that collective, shared vulnerability that we begin to build the collective care we need.
My students are who taught me the necessity of starting with what hurts and never looking away. Students: I will not look away.
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I am an adjunct professor of Asian American studies and disability studies. I teach in other fields as well—religious studies, gender/feminist/women's studies—but I think of myself first and foremost as an Asian Americanist and a disabled disability studies scholar. And as contingent.
This puts me on the periphery of the university multiple times over.
My pedagogy of unwellness is also a pedagogy of contingency. I teach and write as an adjunct, off the tenure-track so that I am not constrained by narrow ideas of what counts as merit and productivity. I center students in my teaching and writing in a way that is neither encouraged nor rewarded on the tenure track. I blend research + arts + pedagogy + community work in ways illegible to many in the university. I retain a foot firmly outside of the academy, a scholar-teacher-writer invested in the academic project but intentionally cultivating a nimbleness to move within, adjacent to, and even against the university. But at great cost. Structural vulnerability has me living through the very unwellness I teach about.
I’ve learned that sometimes the cost of teaching people how to live is that we die. But our students deserve no less.