Passion

Why am I passionate about the research I (want to) do?

That’s a big question for me, as I guess it is for everyone. Mostly, my research focuses on the body, both the physical body and the digital body, and the way it shapes knowledge, meaning, and discourse. I’m interested in this for a lot of reasons. There is something really powerful about our bodies, something so powerful that many people try to recreate their embodied experiences in digital environments. In the online world, we can be whoever we like, yet we still choose to remediate our offline embodiment in many digital arenas. Basically I want to know “what’s the deal with that?”

I think questions of the body are often answered too easily. We rely too heavily on science and myth. We are so busy constructing what good bodies are “not,” we forget to celebrate what real bodies are. Bodies are more than nervous systems, digestive systems, organs, and water. Bodies are semiotic, and we have the privilege and responsibility to deconstruct them as symbols.

Many scholars, and if I considered myself a real scholar yet, I’d include myself with them, argue that understanding the body, troubling the body, dismantling assumptions about the body, and living, reasoning, and knowing in and of the body leads to lasting social change. When we understand and appreciate bodily difference, we understand and appreciate the embodied experience of others, I guess. And that’s important to me, especially in a world that sustains dichotomies based on mind/body, ability/disability, healthy/unhealthy, masculine/feminine, etc. So, I’m passionate because I think this is important. I’m passionate because I don’t think experience, knowledge, or meaning can be separated by the body (after all, it’s where I live).