Toward a Pedagogy of Care and Vulnerability: A Collaborative Autoethnography of (Dis)Embodiment in the Classroom

Using collaborative autoethnography, this essay explores why and how disembodiment happens in our academic—and especially pedagogical—lives. We mobilize our individual and collective lived experiences toward making visible academia’s inherited logics of Cartesian dualism. Flirting with the anti-method paradigm, we work to reconcile the distance between our ethics as Critical Communication Pedagogues and our classroom practices. In particular, we examine how institutionally imposed expectations of credibility and containment associated with the “ideal instructor body” coerce disembodied pedagogical performances as well as the various ways that we, as multiply marginalized teacher-scholars, navigate such expectations of disembodiment. Made possible by our collective neuroqueer orientation, we end by theorizing a pedagogy of care and vulnerability that reembodies our ethical commitments to relationality, grace, and empathy.