Meritocracy, Unwellness, and the University: A Conversation with Mimi Khúc

Join Dr. Mimi Khúc as she shares her work on unwellness and the university from her new book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, in conversation with Professor Nathan Snaza. Applying her framework of a “pedagogy of unwellness,” Dr. Khúc explores the contours of student and faculty unwellness and locates it within the racialized ableism of meritocracy that undergirds university life (and beyond). Academic hyperproductivity across university strata is a kind of unrelenting dehumanization that relies on something she names “compulsory wellness”—the pressure to always pretend you are ok and achieve at the highest levels. We in the university live and work in a machine that makes us unwell while not allowing us to be unwell and punishes us for being unwell and asks us to punish others for being unwell so that we can prove we are well. Join this event to explore together how to disinvest in this form of university wellness and begin to build structures of care that we need.

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