During September, I, Amanda Lin, Student Engagement Facilitator for The School of Disability Studies at Ryerson, had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Adan Jerreat-Poole, the incoming 2020-2022 Ethel Louise Armstrong Postdoctoral Fellow. I’m so excited to get the opportunity to introduce Dr. Adan Jerreat-Poole and their work to our students, alumni, blog readers, and wider community. Please enjoy our great conversation and introduction into Adan’s life, work and interests.
Amanda: Tell us a little about yourself, your life, and interests?
Adan: I’m nonbinary, I use “they/them” pronouns, and I’m working on a stylin’ collection of overalls. My cane is black and kind of sparkly. It makes me feel like a magician. I wear fuzzy sheep pajama bottoms to most of my Zoom meetings. Outside of academia I’m a fiction writer, and my debut queer young adult (YA) fantasy novel, The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass, came out this September. I live in Kingston, Ontario, with my forever partner, who is Palestinian, brilliant, patient, and gorgeous. My Arabic pronunciation needs work, but I’m an enthusiastic learner, and he’s an encouraging teacher.
I’m interested in digital intimacies, in challenging the category of “human,” and in imagining accessible and feminist futures. I’m interested in our relationships with technology, which are currently dominated by capitalist and colonial ideologies, but which I think we could make differently, and hack/mod to use otherwise. I’m interested in collective care, ethical research, and interdependency.
Amanda: What led you to Disability Studies?
Adan: Depression was a bad word when I was growing up, so we used euphemisms instead—I was just tired a lot, just sad a lot, just shy around people. Overly sensitive. Overly imaginative. That’s why I had all the nightmares. During my MA, I went to the doctor for a blood test to explain fatigue, and left with a diagnosis of depression and a prescription of rest. At the time I was angry with the label, but looking back, her treatment plan was one of the wisest I’ve received.
Coupled with depression is my experience of chronic low back pain, which started when I was 17. In my years-long attempt to get a diagnosis and treatment plan, I was shuttled between a lot of (masculine) doctors who told me I was exaggerating, sensitive, or “just” depressed. The medical sexism I experienced in my early 20s was my wake-up call about the systemic biases in the psymedical industry.
Pain: physical and emotional, intertwined, embodied, personal, secret, mine, ours. I didn’t want to be a secret. I didn’t want well-meaning people telling me to try deep breathing and yoga. I wanted to understand why I left each medical encounter feeling small. I wanted to find other people like me.
Discovering disability studies was part of discovering disability justice, of coming into a language that gave me words like “ableism” and “sanism.” Disability studies gave me a space to understand my experience in the broader contexts of capitalism, patriarchy, and prescriptive able bodiedness. Disability justice has also taught me to think beyond my own experience–for example, about the relationship between ableism and colonialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness.
Amanda: What is your academic background?
Adan: In my first year of undergrad at the University of Waterloo, I took an English lit class on a whim, because I was a reader and I liked the idea that reading poetry and fiction was homework. The professor was passionate, I loved the poetry I was reading, and I immediately switched my major. I had no idea what I would do with it–but I loved learning, reading, writing, and thinking. I loved learning about the histories of literature used in revolution and social change. I was especially enamored by modernist writers, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. I’m pretty sure Woolf’s critical portrayal of the psymedical industries in Mrs. Dalloway had a role in that.
During my MA I took a class on adaptation–thinking about the move from book to film and video games–and I had another mental shift. I was starting to feel disillusioned by modernist criticism and the trends in the field. The truth? I didn’t want to write about the 1900s, I wanted to write about what was happening now.
So I turned to cultural studies.
I did my PhD in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, focusing on Mad/crip digital identity play, exploring angst, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and suicidality in social media and videogames. During this time I published articles on online harassment, crip futurity in video games, angry feminist avatar play, and queer feminist digital media use. I graduated this summer.
Amanda: Can you tell our students/readers about your work around digital humanities and gaming? And can you explain to the readers and I, what are digital humanities?
Adan: I think any scholarship that combines humanities methodologies with digital tools, methods, practices, and/or objects falls under the umbrella of the digital humanities (DH). For example, DH might mean studying a video game or hashtag, or using digital platforms and visualizations to communicate your research. DH might also mean using quantitative analysis and/or algorithms in your work. Here are a couple of examples from my own research projects:
- Using Python to collect a dataset of tweets using the corporate wellness hashtag #BellLetsTalk. Analysing the resulting text using Voyant (which tracks word frequency) as well as close reading.
- Writing a personal narrative about nonbinary gender identity in academic spaces and sharing that story through Twine, a free platform that is used to generate interactive choose-your-own-adventure stories. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/nonbinary-twine.html
During my postdoc, I’m hoping to study how queer disabled feminists use digital media –particularly YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram–to create community and to perform collective care and advocacy. I also want to explore how feminist science fiction imagines future crip/queer technologies and relationships with technology.
Amanda: What is it like to start your postdoc during a pandemic – e.g. are you living in the area and do you hope to come to campus, etc.?
Adan: I’m grateful to be part of a supportive and activist-oriented department, and I feel really lucky that I was able to join a community of like-minded scholars during such a difficult time. And it is difficult–we shouldn’t pretend that it isn’t. I’m living in Kingston and am not able to come to the office or to meet anyone from the department in person. I’m getting tension headaches from overusing my screen. I’m constantly refreshing the COVID-19 update page, watching the numbers creep up every few days. I’m worried for my loved ones who are immunocompromised. I’m scared of my landlord. I’ve been playing Half-Life: Alyx, my first virtual reality (VR) game. I’ve been having nightmares. I’m a person, and I’m struggling.
Amanda: Lastly, what are three main things you hope to accomplish in the first year of your postdoc?
Adan: For me, the personal is always political, and the bodymind of the researcher is always in the frame. My experiences of sexism, transphobia, and abliem/sanism shape my understanding of broader systems of violence (that disproportionately impact poor and of colour bodies). I’ve often used personal writing in my academic work. There is no clear line for me between work and home, living and teaching and writing. (And now that many of us are working from home, there are even fewer boundaries!). So my goals for the postdoc are my goals for the year, which will always include my commitment to activism and social justice, and my desire for community, connection, and collective care.
I’m not immunocompromised, so “survive” isn’t on this list–but I know it tops the charts for many, and I want to take a moment to remember all of the academics–students, sessionals, postdocs, TAs, RAs, and faculty–living in fear for their lives: from the virus, from police violence, from abusive partners, from starvation and poverty. These issues need to matter to the university and to academia more broadly.
Here are three goals that are high on my list right now for year one of a panacademic postdoc:
- Have thoughtful conversations–over Zoom, the phone, email, or Google docs; at virtual conferences or informal Skype chats; through tweets, Whatsapp voice notes and text messages–with other scholars, writers, learners, teachers, activists, and fans inside and outside the academy about access and digital media, disability representation in popular culture, and transforming educational, feminist, and queer spaces towards an ethics of rest, interdependency, and care. I hope any student in the School of Disability Studies knows that I would be happy to speak with them about any of the topics related to my research.
- Tell my partner every day that I love him
*** Trigger Warning for depression and weight loss ***
- Eat. The last few months have been really hard on my depression and anxiety. Anxiety triggers IBS, and depression takes away my appetite. Eating is work, and it’s a daily struggle. During past depressive episodes I’ve lost weight unintentionally and it’s really scary.
In solidarity and care,
Adan