Choreographies of KnowledgeMis/fitting in AcademiaChiara Montalti

Introduction

Academia represents the space in which an institutionalized body of knowledge is not only taught but also created, discussed, supported, and crafted in new directions.11The ideas behind this essay have benefited from many conversations I have had in recent years with my peers (‘early-career researchers’ seems inadequate, given that academia’s precarity and underfunding, especially in the humanities, do not guarantee this linear temporality at all). These opportunities for discussion happened mostly in the interstices, in the moments of suspension, in the intimate exchanges — in parentheses that always seemed stolen from work. I especially thank Corrado Claverini, Simona Giorgi, Lorenzo Giovannetti, and Francesco Pisano, for sharing time and space with me. I have also discussed some of these considerations at the Posthuman Summer Camp (Naturama, Galliera, 10–13 August 2023). The starting point of this essay, however, is the consideration of a different kind of knowledge, which is also reinforced or may eventually be contested. This knowledge, however,Beginning of page[p. 206] does not involve a specific field or discipline, and yet it nonetheless represents one of academia’s anchors: how we participate — or not — in the creation and exchange of knowledge. Even though academia involves a great number of ‘actors’ — students, administration, staff, and so on — I focus here on scholars. Researchers and faculty members, more deeply than students, have introjected the modes and gestures I will take into consideration. Most importantly, scholars actively participate in both the creation and the circulation of academic theories and practices. I will frame academia as a peculiar landscape, with its own implicit or explicit rhythms and routes to be navigated, composing what I am here calling choreographies of knowledge. Throughout the chapter, I will interchangeably employ the concepts of choreography and performance, acknowledging, however, that the latter can refer to the overarching ‘execution’, of which the former is just a part. Both concepts may involve kinaesthetic, visual, rhetorical, and verbal elements. A choreography produces continuity over time; it is a consistent interweaving of movement, vocal expression, gesture, and suspension. Reference to this concept allows me to insert, from the start, a bodily presence: it is intended here as an interrelation between bodies, time, and space.

I will explore how embodied subjects grapple with the expectations imposed by the academic environment, examining the performative aspects of scholarly identity construction, and asking how they influence individuals’ credibility and opportunities for acceptance. I will address how academia is structured according to certain times, spaces, and communicative/rhetorical inclinations, and how it tends to exclude bodyminds that seem not to conform to these norms, which concern both cognitive expressions and material, embedded, and situated practices. To Beginning of page[p. 207] better clarify the performative demands I refer to, I will employ scientific conferences as an example. The exploration of ‘not only the practices that characterize academic discourse, but also the attitudes and ways of knowing that underlie those practices’, may enable us to frame academia more precisely.22Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (University of Michigan Press, 2011), p. 8. The chapter will also discuss the potential threats posed by these performative demands to academic scholarship. In this sense, the marginalization of subjects who are perceived as ‘asynchronous’ and misfitting determines an epistemological failure. Finally, I will craft some possible alternative paths: strategies, albeit precarious and tentative, that might help us unveil and challenge the alleged neutrality and immutability of these patterns. My references are mainly situated in disability and neurodiversity studies, but I will also refer to feminist and queer theory.

Critical analyses of academia are not rare and usually aim to challenge exclusionary practices with respect both to students and researchers, especially concerning marginalized minorities.33See Moya Bailey, ‘The Ethics of Pace’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 120.1 (2021), pp. 285–99 <https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916032>; Il tempo per pensare: un bene essenziale per la comunità universitaria, ed. by Brunella Casalini and Silvia D’Addario (Firenze University Press, 2019); Francesca Coin, ‘On Quitting: The Labour of Academia’, Ephemera, 17.3 (2017), pp. 705–19 <https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/quitting> [accessed 1 December 2025]; Francesca Coin, ‘When Love Becomes Self-Abuse: Gendered Perspectives on Unpaid Labor in Academia’, in Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures, ed. by Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 301–20; Daphna Hacker, ‘Crying on Campus’, in Feeling Academic, ed. by Taylor and Lahad, pp. 281–300; Akemi Nishida, ‘Neoliberal Academia and a Critique from Disability Studies’, in Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability, ed. by Pamela Block and others (Springer, 2016), pp. 145–58; Maria do Mar Pereira, Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: An Ethnography of Academia (Routledge, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315692623>. Academia is certainly a privileged Beginning of page[p. 208] context and is still ‘romanticized’ because it allows intellectual innovation, the sharing of knowledge, and a certain amount of freedom and autonomy, while it also confers social status. However, these analyses frequently pinpoint the critical aspects.44Nicole Brown, ‘Introduction: Theorising Ableism in Academia’, in Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education, ed. by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh (UCL Press, 2020), p. 2 <https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787354975>. Contemporary neoliberal academia qualifies as an elite institution: it requires high performativity and promotes competition, pushing researchers to self-promote as subjects worth investing in. Further points that are contested are the demand for hyper-productivity, the quantitative evaluation parameters, and the managerial evolution of the university. Concepts such as ‘excellence’ and ‘merit’ have been revealed as imbued with privilege and often rooted in unequal starting conditions.55See Roberto Brigati, Il giusto a chi va? Filosofia del merito e della meritocrazia (Il Mulino, 2015); Ableism in Academia, ed. by Brown and Leigh. As María Elena Cepeda clarifies, ‘[c]orporatization has undeniably quickened the pace of life in academia’, producing a constant feeling of exhaustion and leaving many academics to realize that they ‘cannot cope’.66María Elena Cepeda, ‘Thrice Unseen, Forever on Borrowed Time: Latina Feminist Reflections on Mental Disability and the Neoliberal Academy’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 120.2 (2021), pp. 301–20 (pp. 306–7) <https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916046>. This critique grounds my perspective too, but I will especially tackle the repetition of narratives and practices that are thought to comply with the space of knowledge, and explore the consequences they entail for the subjectivities involved.Beginning of page[p. 209]

Academic Work as Bodily Labour

Since academia is the realm of exchanges of thought and theoretical analyses, whenever we consider its possible patterns of exclusion, we are inclined to think about selection based on intelligence and cognitive characteristics. This exclusive emphasis on the activity of the mind would obviously reinforce a dualistic perspective which historically substantiates the Western subject and has been the target of several critical analyses — including within disability studies and feminist theory.77See Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Polity, 2019); Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Duke University Press, 2017); Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81; and Price, Mad at School. Beyond that, this dualistic perspective, which grounds the idea of knowledge as disembodied and purely cerebral, is not accurate in describing subjectivities participating in intellectual work. It is important, therefore, to examine the interactions enacted and experienced by bodies in the spaces of knowledge. Here, I will briefly pinpoint the impossibility of disentangling the body from academic work — which, given these premises, appears more accurately identified by the term labour.

In reading academia as a performance, rhythm, space, and time are important, and they matter specifically because we are taking into account bodily labour that is enacted through these axes. Even when we talk about track records, parameters, and publications, we must necessarily be aware that they regard embodied and situated subjects. Our intellectual activity is always ‘embedded, embodied, affective and relational’, and this perspective also allows us to examine our own work as academics differently.88Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, p. 143. In Beginning of page[p. 210] addition, a materialist perspective is necessary to carefully track the processes of exclusion and injustice, which frequently pass precisely through this domain. A disability studies approach would primarily, but not exclusively, pay attention to the material obstacles that can prevent disabled researchers from fully participating in academia: for example, the architectural structure of a university building, or the difficulty of moving away from one’s web of support (for example, to present at conferences, or to enrol in a visiting scholars programme).

As Jennifer Leigh and Nicole Brown claim in Ableism in Academia, ‘there is little space for the body within neoliberal academia.’99Conversations on Embodiment across Higher Education: Teaching, Practice and Research, ed. by Jennifer Leigh (Routledge, 2018), p. 170 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315266664>. See Nishida, ‘Neoliberal Academia’, in Occupying Disability, ed. by Block and others, p. 150. The transparency of the body is assumed as proof of scientific rigour. Academia highly values the intellect and individuals’ cognitive abilities, while largely neglecting the presence and the importance of bodily aspects (with the exclusion of some specific fields, such as the performing arts). As Angela Balzano notes, however, ‘there is no cognitive labour that is not always bodily labour, labour by mammals, earthly labour, just as there is no capital more interested in valorizing ideas than bodies.’1010Angela Balzano, Per farla finita con la famiglia: dall’aborto alle parentele postumane (Meltemi, 2021). Translations from Italian into English are mine.

Following a non-dualistic perspective, according to which the mind/rationality/intellect cannot be separated from the body, I acknowledge many positive, negative, and nuanced features of intellectual work: the role of passion, the inescapable expression of emotions, the Beginning of page[p. 211] material obstacles, and so on.1111See Charlotte Bloch, Passion and Paranoia: Emotions and the Culture of Emotion in Academia (Ashgate, 2012); Rachele Borghi, Decolonialità e privilegio: Pratiche femministe e critica al sistema-mondo (Meltemi, 2020), pp. 25–28; Hacker, ‘Crying on Campus’; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994); Conversations on Embodiment, ed. by Leigh. A materialist perspective on intellectual work makes us painfully aware of how unsustainable academic structures can be, thinking about ‘the long hours and physical pain’ the work can entail, together with the ‘anxiety, despair, [and] resignation’.1212Robert McRuer and Merri L. Johnson, ‘Cripistemologies: Introduction’, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 8.2 (2014), pp. 127–47 (p. 139) <https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2014.12>.

Academic work, work performed by the mind, one might say, can be carried out with extreme efficiency only when the body weighs nothing. When it remains untroubled, seated, composed, back straight, eyes fixed on a computer screen.1313Angela Adami and others, ‘Scomode: Voci e pratiche femministe nell’accademia’, DWF 126.2 (2020), pp. 4–12 (p. 10).

When the body evokes itself and acknowledges the impossibility of its being transparent, aspects emerge that we tend to ignore. (Academic) work may waver, but being conscious of bodies, and paying attention to their needs and possibilities, represents an expertise in itself, which can lead to significant insights, as clarified by Carla Finesilver and others:

[C]onsciously drawing attention to our bodies in this way is, for most of us, a choice. Whatever the state of our bodies, we can choose to pay attention to them or not. This kind of work is hard […]. It is tiring to be self-aware and conscious of one’s body in this way, even while it is valuable, aiding reflexivity and creativity.1414Carla Finesilver and others, ‘Invisible Disability, Unacknowledged Diversity’, in Ableism in Academia, ed. by Brown and Leigh, pp. 143–60 (p. 144).Beginning of page[p. 212]

Certain subjects may be more alert towards these aspects, whether because of the type of research they conduct or due to first-person experience. Disabled or neurodivergent researchers, researchers with chronic illnesses, or researchers who menstruate and/or get pregnant — to name but a few — may be specifically aware that their work can greatly vary depending on their well-being at a certain moment or on the material circumstances of their life (for example, the increased severity of a symptom, or the fear of precarity linked to pregnancy). Nonetheless, to varying degrees, this point concerns everyone: the system of academia exposes the relative vulnerability or suitability of a body.

‘Being an academic takes effort’, and I shall attempt to trace precisely what kind of performative effort it entails.1515Ibid., pp. 144–45. It becomes clear that when we avoid considering the body, we fail to address the relationship between our academic work and our energy, our fatigue, and the often complex interconnection between this work and other spheres of our lives (for example, the desire to cultivate hobbies, or the wish to create significant relationships with friends and partners). We fail to acknowledge the role that all these dimensions enact in academia. Furthermore, the spatial and temporal axes, examined in the following section, have a strong connection with our embedded and embodied position as academics. Paying attention to the presence of the body also grants relevance to topics and practices otherwise excluded, because they are considered out of place in the framework of academia: for example, the presence of accessible toilets in universities, or the organization of time and spaces at conferences.1616See Hacker, ‘Crying on Campus’; and Simone Chess and others, ‘Calling all the Restroom Revolutionaries!’, in That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. by Mathilda Sycamore (Soft Skull Press, 2008), pp. 216–35. The presence of material Beginning of page[p. 213] aspects which can devalue or, alternatively, boost our academic profiles is pervasive: it is, simply, not explicitly thematized.

Academic Work as Performance

Everything concerning the realm of knowledge is also a performative machine. And by this, I do not just mean that the logic produced and reproduced is one of excellence, hyper-productivity, and competition, but also that in many cases, it represents a choreographed and rhetorical execution. Academic research, for instance, involves the repetition of a gesturality, a way of moving and communicating, a manner in which to build a space, and then to inhabit it. This point becomes evident when we emphasize that every type of intellectual and cognitive work is always also material, embodied, and situated. In this section, I will frame academia not simply as a work setting, but as a practice which is done. Therefore, I will explore which ‘choreographies’ are normally entrusted with value and are consequently reinforced. This iteration, on the other hand, tends to marginalize other forms of behaviours, habits, and modes of interaction. Choreographies, as I have said, are composed of rhythms in certain times and spaces; I will pay attention especially to these dimensions.

I do not claim that every academic framework perfectly overlaps with others, in a homogeneous repetition of the same. Nonetheless, it is possible to trace some features which transversally characterize this domain. For example, despite intellectual inquiry being commonly connected to autonomy and freedom of thought, neoliberal academia establishes a rather fixed structure and requires certain forms Beginning of page[p. 214] of participation and output. It is normally based on the respect of rigid hierarchies of power, self-promotion, the publish or perish ‘rule’, and hyper-productivity. It is important to note that these choreographies are enacted not only in collective contexts (for example, in conferences or during spontaneous conversations within university spaces) but also in the individual management of work: they are internalized.1717See Leigh and Brown, ‘Internalised Ableism’. These patterns concur not only to shape the work conducted but also to substantiate the academic subject. It is possible to trace some explicit or implicit patterns that ‘appropriately’ convey what Eva Bendix Petersen calls academicity: ‘How does this being come to know how to act, speak, think, write, and feel as an academic: how is “academicity”, or academichood, produced?’1818Eva Bendix Petersen, ‘Negotiating Academicity: Postgraduate Research Supervision as Category Boundary Work’, Studies in Higher Education, 32.4 (2007), pp. 475–87 (p. 477) <https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070701476167>.

The figure of the perfect academic takes shape from the adherence to different norms that I will explore here. The temporality and spatiality that characterize academia are anchored precisely on a ‘normate’ subject.1919The normate is a term coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (Columbia University Press, 1997): ‘This neologism names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries. The term normate usefully designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings’ (p. 8). Time and space appear transparent and neutral only to those who can conform to these directives, and therefore often go unmentioned as binding dimensions. In most cases, space is invisible: it is only seen by those who struggle to access it. Our orientations around temporality, too, are often Beginning of page[p. 215] implicit. Even though I am distinguishing here between time and space, there is obviously a deep interconnection between these two dimensions, which shape a continuum: namely, a choreography.

It is important to note that the spatial perspective I am here referring to is simultaneously material and discursive: I intend the space of knowledge as an actual place and as a cluster of expectations, norms, obstacles, and possibilities. It is very difficult to separate these two senses of spatiality, and usually, they mutually influence each other. Spaces are never neutral; they contain sociocultural narratives. The characteristics of places produce subjects and are shaped by them in turn.2020See Jennifer Charteris and others, ‘A Heterotopology of the Academy: Mapping Assemblages as Possibilised Heterotopias’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30.4 (2017), pp. 340–53 <https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1250178>. These processes involve the direct participation of the body — although it is, sometimes, an imagined, ideal one. Spaces have always been a core topic in disability studies and in the activism of the disability community, under the umbrella concept of accessibility: not only might we not be able to access the same spaces, but how we inhabit them can differ significantly. Do we openly discuss these movements of opening/closure, presence/absence, inclusion/exclusion, or do they remain unexpressed? In the academic context, who feels in the right place, and who, on the other hand, assimilates the dominant perspective, internalizing the feeling of not legitimately occupying this space?2121See Borghi, Decolonialità e privilegio; Maddie Breeze, ‘Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling’, in Feeling Academic, ed. by Taylor and Lahad, pp. 191–219; Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Berg, 2004); Yvette Taylor, ‘Navigating the Emotional Landscapes of Academia: Queer Encounters’, in Ableism in Academia, ed. by Brown and Leigh, pp. 61–87.Beginning of page[p. 216]

The geography of academia is ‘powerfully rhetorical’, and ‘shapes the bodies within these spaces’.2222Jay T. Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (University of Michigan Press, 2017), p. 8. How we understand academic subjects affects how we build the spaces they inhabit. Jay Dolmage employs the example of a staircase at the entrance of a university building to convey both the ‘physical’ and ‘rhetorical’ nature of the space in which the present analyses are situated:

[T]he steep stairs outside of a university lecture hall can be critiqued as a spatial and architectural feature that excludes; the stairs can also be understood as making a rhetorical argument or sending a message at the same time; and also at the very same time the stairs should push us to understand that other features of the institution that may not be as immediately recognizable to us, also set up steep steps.2323Ibid., p. 9.

As stated by disability studies scholar Fiona Kumari Campbell, even the choice of furniture within a university signals compliance with highly standardized prospects.2424Fiona Kumari Campbell, ‘The Violence of Technicism: Ableism as Humiliation and Degrading Treatment’, in Ableism in Academia, ed. by Brown and Leigh, pp. 202–24 (p. 211). See also Tanya Titchkosky, The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (University of Toronto Press, 2011). The concept of accessibility invites us to consider not only how a space is built but also how design varies depending on context, and therefore how adjustments are differently distributed. For example, we normally expect to find ramps in hospitals, but these are not so common in conference rooms. The presence/absence of accessible toilets and the presence/absence of ramps and tactile indicators for blind people reveal the typical population we expect to find in a Beginning of page[p. 217] given place — say, on campuses.2525See Chiara Montalti, ‘Mapping Disability Politics through Cyborg Coalitions’, AG — About Gender, 9.18 (2020), pp. 50–82 <https://doi.org/10.15167/2279-5057/AG2020.9.18.1219>; Chess and others, ‘Calling all the Restroom Revolutionaries!’, in That’s Revolting, ed. by Sycamore; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha makes a similar point concerning the space of art: even though it is possible to find seats for disabled people in the audience, it is significantly rarer to have stages accessible for disabled artists and performers. See Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp, 2018). The question of space is also profoundly connected with time: the time and mental energy spent asking for accommodation, or the time needed to move between classes and university offices.2626See Campbell, ‘The Violence of Technicism’; and Price, Mad at School. In addition to the elements mentioned, some authors consider accessibility more broadly, highlighting, for example, the need to find adequate food and the possibility that this may need to be requested because of specific medical conditions (Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh, ‘Preface’, in Ableism in Academia, ed. by Brown and Leigh, pp. xv–xvi), and also, from an intersectional perspective, the possibility to choose vegan food. See Sunaura Taylor, ‘Toward a New Table Fellowship’, in Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), pp. 149–56.

I now turn my attention to temporality. I shall consider, in particular, how the analyses proposed by disability studies and feminist theory can be applied to academia, even though they could encompass a great variety of frameworks. While the concept of accessibility is most frequently associated with spatiality, disability scholars and activists have expanded the concept to tackle the dimension of time as well; my perspective here is profoundly indebted to their work. Disability scholars have pinpointed the power of normative orientations to temporality to reassert which subjects meet standard expectations in a given context. The concept of crip time has emerged to expose the artificiality of this alleged norm, and it embraces multiple temporalities: the fact that disabled, chronically ill,Beginning of page[p. 218] or neurodivergent people might move at different paces — not simply more slowly, but sometimes in fractured or accelerated ways. Crip time may encompass the ‘wasted’ time spent in hospitals, the extra time needed to get somewhere because of the absence of accessible transport, or it might denote the energies (mental or physical) expendable for certain actions.2727See Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work; Mara Pieri, LGBTQ+ People with Chronic Illness: Chroniqueers in Southern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); Margaret Price, ‘The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain’, Hypatia, 30.1 (2015), pp. 268–84 <https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12127>; Ellen Samuels, ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 37.3 (2017) <https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824>; Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Introduction: Crip Temporalities’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 120.2 (2021), pp. 245–54 <https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8915937>. Crip time also means to acknowledge that standard temporalities count as ‘a factor that determines how disabled a person is’.2828McRuer and Johnson, ‘Cripistemologies’, p. 139. Beyond ‘what crip time is’, Alison Kafer invites us to explore ‘what crip time does’: it can, for example, push to expand expectations as to the amount of time needed to perform certain actions or to achieve certain goals, which are based on standardized bodyminds.2929Alison Kafer, ‘After Crip, Crip Afters’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 120.2 (2021), pp. 415–34 (p. 420) <https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916158>. See Titchkosky, The Question of Access. It may represent a resistance towards the feeling of being less productive. Crip time invokes the necessity for flexibility and for experimenting with unforeseen relationships with temporality: an openness to the unexpected, to contingency, to the need to reschedule something.

Further relevant references here are the analyses conducted by feminist theorists and queer theorists, especially on the need for deceleration and slowness and on the desire to challenge the alleged linearity of time. Feminist theory Beginning of page[p. 219] does not simply insist on the quantitative dimension of time, but highlights, in an anti-capitalistic move, that time should not be invested purely in exploitative and quantifiable activities.3030See María Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘Think We Must, Again! Notes from Academia Inc.’, keynote lecture delivered at the conference ‘Think We Must! 25 Years of Feminist Knowledge Production. The Big Debate’ (Brussels, 21 November 2014) <https://www.academia.edu/31116974/Think_We_Must_Again_Notes_from_Academia_Inc_Text_of_2014_talk_at_SOPHIA> [accessed 1 December 2025]. These analyses do not simply advocate for extra time — even though the importance of leisure time and more time to think and to cultivate relationships beyond the workplace are rightfully urgent topics — but promote ‘a qualitatively different use of time that is not indexed on short-term and fast productivity’.3131Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, p. 149. See The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, ed. by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber (University of Toronto Press, 2016); Il tempo per pensare, ed. by Casalini and D’Addario. In addition, queer theory examines, through the concept of chrononormativity, how the assumption of a universal temporality substantiates our race towards productivity and social acceptance, and pinpoints ‘how power and oppression are also exercised through time’.3232Pieri, LGBTQ+ People with Chronic Illness, p. 29. See Ellen Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke University Press, 2011); Samuels and Freeman, ‘Crip Temporalities’.

‘As academics’, Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman claim, ‘we knew that our lives were structured by time as a vector of power.’3333Samuels and Freeman, ‘Crip Temporalities’, p. 245. How much time it takes to think about something, or to write a paper, for example, is not objective: it can vary depending on someone’s duties in their personal life, or according to the needs and limitations of a bodymind (for example, a fluctuating chronic pain, or mental distress). The framework of crip time, and Beginning of page[p. 220] the challenge to chrononormativity, in this context, can also lead us to positively value the time spent on activities that most likely would not fit into the scores, whether real or metaphorical, on which research is structured. Feminist deceleration means to recognize that ‘the time for reflection and open-ended enquiry is a core value and not a luxury’.3434Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, pp. 148–49. Through the analyses presented, we can detect how unrealistic and alarming ‘the speed with which we are supposed to produce intellectual thought’ is, while at the same time we can acknowledge that we, too, demand this speed from ourselves and others. The politicization of time — the fact that our experience of it and our expectations are not neutral — also allows us to unveil the systemic fault:

Corporatization has undeniably quickened the pace of life in academia. I used to wonder if the problem was entirely me, if as a mentally disabled person I was simply unfit for the profession. Yet such an individualistic approach is misguided.3535Cepeda, ‘Thrice Unseen’, pp. 306–07. See also Nishida, ‘Neoliberal Academia’, p. 149.

These critical analyses can therefore be liberatory, mobilizing the entire academic context instead of insisting on one’s ‘unfitness’.

The dimensions traced so far lay the foundations of several features that profoundly qualify academia: for example, presence, participation, productivity, competence, independence, and attention all have material connotations and are expressed through the axes of time and space. We tend to imagine that each of these features unfolds in a certain way, and that they shape academic research; consider, for instance, how lessons are structured, or how Beginning of page[p. 221] interactions in scientific events are framed. The time someone needs to prepare the draft of a book determines, at least to some extent, whether they are qualified as competent and productive. Participation, presence, and attention are also differently interpreted depending on spatial aspects: being online, for example, tends to devalue them.3636See Cristina Costa, ‘Digital Scholars: A Feeling for the Academic Game’, in Feeling Academic, ed. by Taylor and Lahad, pp. 345–68. It is also through our experience of academic time and space that we judge a researcher’s ‘fitness’ or, conversely, we detect an improper performance of academicity. In particular, these performances are not neutral. Furthermore, rigid ‘academic timetables and systems are often unable to cope with fluctuations in capacity and need, and how specific accommodations might be required at different times, with little warning’; this can affect everyone but can be particularly distressing for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people.3737Carla Finesilver and others, ‘Invisible Disability’, p. 149. See Bailey, ‘The Ethics of Pace’. This point can also be counterbalanced, however, by the presence of conflicting tensions; for example, a neurodivergent researcher might be particularly able to hyperfocus on their topic of interest but yet be considerably less comfortable in adhering to other academic requests, such as interpreting academic politics.

I will now situate the analyses presented within a specific framework — conferences — to better clarify what I mean by way of a concrete example. In particular, I will consider in-person conferences, a context that allows consideration of the tight interlace between time, space, and performative skills. In this regard, I am drawn to pay attention both to ‘formal’ exchanges (such as paper presentations) and ‘informal’ ones (such as the moments between talks and keynotes, or social dinners), and to how smoothly Beginning of page[p. 222](or not) we move from one to the other. It is urgent to examine both the exclusionary consequences of this structure and the adjustments that can be enacted to counteract them.

Scientific conferences are very peculiar frameworks. Whereas intellectual activity appears, as I have mentioned, to be an autonomous and independent endeavour,3838As already underlined, this aspect is largely ideal. However, if we exclusively consider carrying out, writing, and presenting research — therefore removing teaching and institutional duties from the equation — the management of work is considerably individualized. a conference takes a rigid structure: temporal and spatial aspects are planned in advance, and there is little space for variations — except when we eventually leave the space. At the same time, conferences appear to accelerate the pace at which we are usually called to think, produce intellectual activity, network, and exchange opinions. It is also possible that conferences raise conflicting forms of attentiveness: for example, we must simultaneously participate and carry on the rest of our academic work as if we were at home.3939See Emily F. Henderson ‘Feminist Conference Time: Aiming (Not) to Have Been There’, in Feeling Academic, ed. by Taylor and Lahad, pp. 33–60. These moments of scientific research are heavily standardized because they are grounded in a heavily standardized subject. The aspects that prevail reward subjects with non-disabled, non-vulnerable, non-divergent bodyminds: spontaneity, rapidity, extroversion, ease of movement. Few physiological needs are privileged — conferences are, after all, a space for the mind. As Dolmage sums up, ‘academia powerfully mandates able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, as well as other forms of social and communicative hyperability.’4040Dolmage, Academic Ableism, p. 18.Beginning of page[p. 223]

Conferences promote a certain temporality for the presentation of and response to intellectual content and for registering information — namely, promptly. There might be someone fatigued by chronic pain: they might need more time, or different timing (in solitude) to process and respond to information in an intellectual context. Trauma, fatigue, pain, and brain fog can ‘haunt’ the capacity to absorb, manage, and rework language. Conferences also presume a standard capacity to move from one talk to another: does the planning consider the space needed ‘for manoeuvring several types of wheelchairs and mobility aids’?4141Brown and Leigh, ‘Preface’, pp. xv–xvi; See Finesilver and others, ‘Invisible Disability’. Are there accessible toilets in the building, located near enough to not miss talks and keynotes? How many minutes are foreseen between talks, to decompress, or simply reflect in solitude, and is there a place to do so without leaving the conference entirely?4242See Ableism in Academia, ed. by Brown and Leigh. As regards communicative exchanges (formal and informal), they too are usually based on certain physical, sensory, and cognitive characteristics. They are almost exclusively oral: multi-modality communication is very rare (for example, the presence of a sign language interpreter, or written transcription). They also follow a certain rhythm, and this is also clear in informal moments: everyone should always be active and appear at ease. The privileged expression of attention and participation, for example, involves a sceptical and confrontational attitude, as frequently emerges in Q&A sessions. As Margaret Price emphasizes, these performative skills are also profoundly structured against mental disabilities. Because of the non-standard patterns that neurodivergent people sometimes Beginning of page[p. 224] follow, their ‘words, gestures, [and] appearance’ risk not being granted credibility in scientific contexts.4343Price, Mad at School, p. 26.

[S]ome of us are more charming online. Or over a long period of time. Or while lying down, or while our hands are occupied with a stim device. What we say might be fascinating, but our voices might tremble or be slurred; we might need to stare out the window, or tap on the table, while saying them. We might shake visibly, sweat profusely, or make remarks that seem off-topic.4444Ibid., p. 105.

The management of emotional and cognitive aspects, along with the control of the bodily needs that must sometimes be enacted, pile on the skills that allow one to efficiently ‘read’ the conference: the hierarchies of power, the implicit demands, or the rhetoric that better suits that specific group of people.

Mis/fitting in Academia

Consider the last conference you attended: did events run from 9:00 a.m. until late at night? […] [D]o such occasions assume each participant will have the ability to meet people, interact, and function for hours on end? Consider the persons who did not attend. Do you know who they are?4545Ibid., p. 13.

How long is it sustainable for us, from a bodily, emotional, and cognitive standpoint, to remain at a conference? But also: how long is it sustainable, for us, to remain in academia? Price’s quote links a reflection on conferences to the topic of the failure that derives from the standardized approach I have presented so far. Failure, in academia,Beginning of page[p. 225] usually means that someone cannot correspond to the expectations outlined above, concerning productivity, performance, communication skills, and ways of inhabiting the spaces of knowledge. However, I do not consider here when we fail in academia; on the contrary, I aim to underline how academia fails us. By us, I generally mean scholars, but I remain perfectly aware of the differences in privilege, opportunities, discrimination, and accessibility needs. Failure, here, is represented by the marginalization and/or expulsion of subjects who cannot keep up the pace, or who appear asynchronous about the general context. ‘Rather than embracing difference as a reflection of wider society, academic ecosystems seek to normalise and homogenise ways of working and of being a scholar.’4646Brown, ‘Introduction: Theorising Ableism in Academia’, p. 5. I wish to highlight the paradox here: on the one hand, academia privileges competence and individualism; on the other, it fails to consider differential subjectivities.

The point that I seek to make here is not that a certain rhythm is nonsensical; obviously, every context involves the drawing of appropriate gestures, attitudes, and practices. The problem is firstly the alleged neutrality of these choices, and secondly the exclusionary effects they have. The struggle that some scholars may face in conforming to the standards presented is rarely explicit, and the avoidance of confronting these standards ends up reinforcing them. Nonetheless, conformity to the choreography we perceive going on around us can be motivated by the need to survive. Precarious researchers are obviously encouraged to adapt without complaint to the academic landscape. The path, therefore, seems to bifurcate: the first possibility is to find a way to cope, and the second possibility is to withdraw because it is impossible to conform to these imperatives.Beginning of page[p. 226] As Price underlines, ‘[t]he instruments of exclusion are not visible or dramatic — men in white coats dragging people away — but quiet, insidious’, as is clear from an examination of the micro-aspects of academic life I have mentioned so far.4747Price, Mad at School, pp. 6–7.

When the academic landscape is too homogeneous, it fails not only on an ethical and political level but also on an epistemological one. Firstly, in feminist theory and disability studies, the impossibility of identifying a standard represents a core point — a standard subject, a standard gender performance, a standard speed, and so on.4848These fields are obviously not the only ones to ‘trouble’ the universal (humanistic) subject, but they represent my main references here. Feminist theorists and disability studies scholars emphasize the need to embrace diversity and heterogeneity. From this perspective, structures need to be reconfigured, including those within academia. Secondly, difference not only exists but also appears as a potentiality. Academic encounters involve subjects with different biographies, privileges, levels of productivity, communication skills, bodyminds, and so on. The more accessible and liveable the spaces, times, and structures of academic research are, the more diverse subjectivities participate in the production of knowledge, allowing for multiple perspectives to co-exist and thrive. What might appear as restrictions, adjustments, challenging adaptations, dispersed energies, or even illegitimate complaints instead represent an increment of possibilities, making spaces of knowledge more sustainable for everyone.

But what would happen if we considered plurality as the norm? And how could we guarantee this change of pace? It seems important now to propose how we might Beginning of page[p. 227] propagate possible new rhythms, and consequently affirm a more sustainable academia. To do so, I wish to introduce the concept of the ‘misfit’.4949For a phenomenological account of how subjects can be differently oriented towards material/discursive space, see Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006). The concept is explored by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, mainly with reference to bodily variations, and is taken up by Price with regard to mental disabilities.

Fitting and misfitting denote an encounter in which two things come together in either harmony or disjunction. When the shape and substance of these two things correspond in their union, they fit. A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole. The problem with a misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward attempt to fit them together. When the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it meanings and consequences. […] The discrepancy between body and world, between that which is expected and that which is, produces fits and misfits.5050Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept’, Hypatia 26.3 (2011), pp. 591–609 (pp. 592–93) <https://doi.org/ and 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01206.x>.

Misfitting can enhance resourcefulness and innovative perspectives: an inadequate relationship between subjects and their material environment can push them to imagine a new reality and negotiate a more just and creative interplay between the two.5151Ibid.; Price, Mad at School. Discomfort can become a motor of change, and new fittings between the academic subject and academia can make their way through. In this regard,Beginning of page[p. 228] disabled people explore ways to carry out actions, relate to others, and programme events (cultural, artistic, social, and so on) that take seriously into account the needs and characteristics of diverse bodyminds.5252See Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Alison Kafer, ‘Un/Safe Disclosures: Scenes of Disability and Trauma’, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 10.1 (2016), pp. 1–20 <https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2016.1>; Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work; s.e. smith, ‘The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People’, Catapult, 22 October 2018 <https://magazine.catapult.co/column/stories/the-beauty-of-spaces-created-for-and-by-disabled-people> [accessed 1 December 2025]; and Titchkosky, The Question of Access. Because of this, my main references here are drawn from the areas of disability and neurodiversity studies, but the concept of the misfit can also exceed these domains to include everyone who experiences complex friction with the academic landscape. In addition, early-career researchers, specifically, live not uncommonly in a condition of precarity; this academic positioning can both exacerbate forms of exclusion and enable these subjects to uncover the same mechanisms.

This chapter aims to enlighten the normative standards of academia and invokes, first and foremost, the requirement for us to look among us and within ourselves to recognize that this landscape is sometimes inhospitable. Therefore, I emphasize the need to acknowledge the effort and the fatigue: academic choreographies are not performed smoothly by every subject. It is necessary to recognize that the space, time, and communication skills normally requested (and how these elements compose dominant choreographies) are neither inevitable nor neutral. Some aspects, such as the push to hyper-productivity, the implicit request to always be available, and the neglect of bodily limits, represent prohibitive demands for everyone. To welcome diverse subjectivities, we must prefer Beginning of page[p. 229] instability and flexibility rather than repetition of the same rhythms. Since, as I have pointed out above, intellectual work is carried out by embedded and embodied subjects, their material encounters with the world must be taken into account. In these frameworks, choreographies must not necessarily unfold smoothly: moments of arrest, suspension, and doubt are welcomed in the spaces we share. Choreographies shatter, and new paces must settle in. On this path, it is necessary to acknowledge ‘the ambivalence of simultaneously inhabiting — and seeking legitimacy and recognition within — the neoliberal university while trying to resist and rework these forms of educational governance and practice’.5353Breeze, ‘Imposter Syndrome’, p. 210.

On a practical level, are there possible forms of resistance through which to counter-attack this shared pressure?5454See Bailey, ‘The Ethics of Pace’, p. 287. Even though my purpose is primarily a change of perspective, I also wish to map some steps that might characterize this path, thanks to what Price calls ‘microrebellions’.5555Price, Mad at School, p. 7. The aim is to orient ourselves, and possibly others, in new ways, for example, by acknowledging how dissonance does not necessarily equate to incompetence and unfitness. These strategies can unsettle the standard, even ironically, and must be not only relational but also self-focused. The purpose is to produce ruptures and subversion in academic choreographies, since their enactment, as mentioned, does not simply represent shared identity but ends up being exclusionary. A preliminary point along this path, therefore, must be to practise attentiveness and care: we must be alert and curious towards difference and acknowledge it as legitimate.Beginning of page[p. 230]

The first strategy is represented by a form of care toward ourselves, acknowledging our fatigue and the forms of injustice we endure. This approach might include ‘self-monitoring’, aimed at detecting our limits and therefore ‘sav[ing] energy whenever possible’, ‘anticipat[ing] the conditions that render it difficult if not impossible to work’.5656Cepeda, ‘Thrice Unseen’, p. 310. See Samuels, ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’. When we are near the point of breaking, physically, emotionally, and cognitively, can we grant ourselves the ability to say no? This might also mean fully recognizing that a certain correspondence to these performances has also been possible (if it has been so) thanks to the bodyminds we have relied on so far. By this, I do not mean the capitalist and mainstream imperative to ‘self-care’, which seems simply to promote individualism and to propose attention to our own needs and well-being at the expense of a collaborative critique of systemic injustice. This self-referred commitment is as personal as it is political: it can allow us to resist bolstering the patterns presented in relation to our peers as well.

Collectively, it might mean refusing to legitimize a culture of overworking, of contacting people beyond work hours, or it might mean understanding that not everyone can respond to a query with a brief notice. A significant move may be to openly share — at least among peers — whenever the performative effort seems to set too high a bar. Concerning more ironic proposals, it is worth mentioning the invitation by Melanie Stefan to share ‘curricula of failures’ in addition to curricula of achievements, which could encourage collective reflection on the widespread phenomenon of imposter syndrome and positively rework Beginning of page[p. 231] the shame of not meeting the standard.5757See Megan Stefan, ‘A CV of Failures’, Nature, 468.467 (2010) <https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7322-467a>; Breeze, ‘Imposter Syndrome’. The expansion of possibilities might also include the promotion of less rigid settings within which to share and present academic work, which could more readily include subjects with diverse accommodation needs.5858See Francesca Ferrando and Stefano Rozzoni, ‘Vision Quest in Posthumanist Education: Focuses, Praxes and Experiences’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 31.4 (2023) <https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2023.2290552>; Margaret Price, ‘Access Invocation’, Margaret Price (blog), n.d. <https://margaretprice.wordpress.com/access-statement-for-presentations/> [accessed 1 December 2025]. In general, it is important to start reading the spaces we find ourselves in when we do academic work: What do they communicate? Who is absent? What could we do to grant more accessibility, enhance safety, and disempower the hierarchies? Which subjects appear to us as out of place because of their alleged lack of rhetorical skill? About conferences, for example, Price invites us to think about what this change of pace might imply:

it might mean recognizing that people will arrive at various intervals, and designing sessions accordingly; and it might also mean recognizing that audience members are processing language at various rates and adjusting the pace of conversations.5959Price, Mad at School, p. 62.

Price proposes to make explicit the non-neutrality of the space, and the fact that certain subjects might need to inhabit it in non-typical ways.6060‘Please feel invited to use this space in whatever ways are accessible to you. For example, you may want to move around; stand up; lie down; put your feet up; go out and come back in; stim; engage with another person (for instance, by writing a note to a friend); post on social media; take notes; or make another use of this space that feels right to you’ (Price, ‘Access Invocation’). Akemi Nishida invites Beginning of page[p. 232] us to spend part of our time discussing accessibility arrangements, and this could become a formal task in the management of academic settings.6161Nishida, ‘Neoliberal Academia’, pp. 153–54.

A Conclusion, or an Opening

There are implicit or explicit norms and standards that govern academia. The creation, discussion, and dissemination of knowledge are guided by specific conventions that reflect the expectations and practices that characterize this landscape. Each intervention within this framework is a performance that contributes to the construction of the traditional choreography of knowledge — or, on the contrary, that might contribute to the exploration of new trajectories. I have examined, in particular, how space, time, and modes of communication affect the subjects involved in academia. It is especially important to reveal how spatial and temporal dimensions usually unfold with respect to bodyminds, with the purpose of altering and reorienting their interconnections.

In this regard, we are called to actively relate to the world and pay attention to the elements emerging from the relationships in which we are embedded. Responding to diversity leads to honouring diversity, and therefore experimenting with new ways of being together. In this relational perspective, the desire to create liveable times and spaces gains significance. ‘Thinking’, as Rosi Braidotti suggests, ‘is about increasing our relational capacity.’6262Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, p. 79. Indeed, my discussion in this chapter has both ethical-political and epistemological implications: vibrant and heterogeneous ‘choreographies’ of knowledge are not only just, insofar as they refuse to perpetuate exclusion, but they are also fertile,Beginning of page[p. 233] as they guarantee the presence of a plurality of perspectives. Diverse forms of participation, experience, biographies, and bodily expressions can enrich the academic landscape.

This essay has aimed not only to critically address the normative standards presented but also to make space for generative perspectives, in order to challenge our sense of ‘apathy’ and ‘powerlessness’ within the academic framework outlined here.6363Charteris and others, ‘A Heterotopology of the Academy’, p. 340. The aim, therefore, is to spark conversations, at a collective level, on how it might be possible ‘to speak back to politics in the academy’.6464Ibid., p. 343. The strategies that could be enacted do not simply represent a to-do list, however helpful they might be — the presence of accessible toilets, no email during the weekends, the valorization of different communication skills, and so on — but urge us, following the artistic metaphor of choreography, to cultivate a creative openness towards the heterogeneity among us. This is in line with what Tanya Titchkosky calls a ‘politics of wonder’: the idea of surprising one another with the possibility of diverging from the normative standard, also through untested practices and unthought concepts. Furthermore, access is a relation.6565Tanya Titchkosky, ‘Towards a Politics of Wonder in Disability Studies’, in Titchkosky, The Question of Access, pp. 129–50. Even though scholars of disability and neurodiversity studies represent the main reference here, because of their significant critical work on this topic, this invitation exceeds them: ‘anyone, regardless of disability status, would benefit from a cripped form of space and time.’6666Price, ‘Access Invocation’. As Samuels and Freeman ask:

What if temporal rhythms and their attached notions of normalcy, productivity, and community Beginning of page[p. 234] were forever cripped, detached from chrononormative capitalist structures and predicated instead on the myriad realities of bodyminds along a spectrum of abilities?6767Samuels and Freeman, ‘Crip Temporalities’, p. 252.

The multiple choreographies that could proliferate should not be restricted simply to questions of ‘speed’ or ‘slowness’, but rather should guarantee many possible fittings with academia through the experimentation of ‘new rhythms, new practices of time, new sociotemporal imaginaries’.6868Ibid., p. 251.