In, Against, and Beyond the Ivory: Dreams of Belonging Otherwise through Wonder and Embodied Poetry

Abstract

In this article, the authors navigate how equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) projects tether us to the neoliberal university in seductive and ultimately, limited ways. The topical triad of EDI, explored through the Canadian Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences’ “Igniting Change: Final Report and Recommendations,” holds important stories about how disability, race, and broadly speaking, normalcy, matter to academic institutions. How is disability storied within the neoliberal university? How are we called to belong within, and be members of, the university through the promise of progress? A poetic engagement creates space for wonder, simultaneously effacing stories that claim to know disability, race, and other forms of being-in-the-world codified as non-normal. As an expression of feeling as freedom, embodied poetry is a creative response to white-settler hegemonic interests that foreclose possibilities for meanings of disability and race; embodied poetry potentiates dreams of living otherwise within, against, and beyond the ivory.