Theodora Danylevich, PhD, (she/her) teaches in Disability Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies, Writing, and the Medical Humanities at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on feminist and disability critical methodologies and liberatory aesthetics. Her current book project conceptualizes “[sic]k tactics” as resistant engagements with confining social scripts, and illustrates the framework across a range of examples in literary, aesthetic, pedagogical, and organizational contexts. She is the co-curator of “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry,” and her scholarly writing has appeared in Lateral, Rhizomes, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Integrative and Innovative Humanities, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and PEITHO.
[sic]k times, [sic]k tactics: organizing in academia through crises
I conceptualize archiving in the context of movement work as a distinctly feminized and access-oriented register of organizing. This can look like record-keeping, protocol-setting, and forming mission statements or undertaking the process of collective bargaining — these can be daily, mundane acts of preservation and care that help to weave our work into stories and actions, but also vital components of rest and breath-taking. This chapter aims to align movement archiving with counterintuitive slowing down in moments of crisis – like taking sick days (potentially stigmatized and gendered states of labor and being) – and thus with an anti-ableist and feminist mode of resistance, oriented towards survival, but passing by necessity through the architrave of stigma, sickness, and slowness as critique that sustains us.