Mattering Rest at Disability Matters ∞ Ways of Perceiving

By Fiona Ning Cheuk M.A., Doctoral Candidate in Social Justice Education, Ontario, Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Read more about Disability Matters ∞ Ways of Perceiving: International Conversations.

There is much to be said about all the connective and provocatively thoughtful exchanges that took place at Disability Matters ∞ Ways of Perceiving – from a thoughtful discussion of the complex depathologizing work done against the backdrop of a pathologizing university; to  exciting book launches highlighting the intersectional nuances of disability; to thoughtful, almost poetic analyses of how disability has been perceived and responded to in the presenters’ everyday encounters. In the midst of these brilliant conversations I can't help but keep thinking about the moment where I paused – as Dr. Elaine Cagulada often mentions is an important thing to do– and I rested.

I rested during the latter half of the conference. I felt overwhelmed and I found it getting harder and harder to turn sound into language. I could no longer process verbal information. So, I went to the quiet room and lay down in silence. Usually when I experience auditory and verbal processing overload, and words become indecipherable sounds that feel physically painful and feel like they're not coming out, I won’t take a rest if I'm on campus. Despite knowing that I need to rest, I will rarely feel welcome to do so in academic spaces. At most, I’m accustomed to removing myself from the event entirely when I can no longer endure it.

In my heart I know that resting matters to disability studies and disabled people. Resting is an important anti-ableist politic (Crow 2017). But disability studies takes place somewhere, and this somewhere is higher education cultural spaces that are built along the grains of academic ableism (Dolmage 2017). The social organization of academic spaces privileges bodies of learners, educators, and researchers who can overcome their needs to rest under the logic of academic ableism. Under the knowledge production machine called the university, rest is at best perceived as a privilege, and at worst perceived as a character trait such as laziness. As the university is always a part of the medical industrial complex, unless a person in need of rest can produce a medical or psychiatric note that prescribes rest, the publicly resting body in academic settings is out of place. The university where Disability Matters took place is no exception (Titchkosky 2011). In my experiences being a student at UofT I’ve noticed that resting is an unexpected activity that is done quietly, carefully, unobtrusively, and dare I say, almost secretively? After all, resting as an activity in that very same university is organized as excessive to the norms of bodies who dwell within academic spaces. The need for medical notes that document rest only as an individual accommodation, and the presence of security guards who hold the authority to ask resting bodies to leave the premises are but a few examples of that. 

But something different was happening that day at Disability Matters. That day I felt that resting would not be out of place. 

Perhaps it was in the repeated emphasis on the existence of a quiet room and where to find it in the opening remarks and attention to different experiences of sound. Perhaps it was the countless moments of interdependency I noticed happening around the room between conference goers with all sorts of bodies. Perhaps it was the consideration put into making sure that everybody had a chair (with adjustable arms) if they wanted one, even if we had to borrow them from other rooms. Perhaps it was because my access needs were continually being met without having to ask for them. Such as when Professor Titchkosky handed me her phone with Gallaudet transcription app already opened and to provide captions during the lunch-with-the-author break. Perhaps it was because I knew it was a disability studies event. And perhaps, it was because shortly after I lay down to rest, a fellow conference participant joined me. When she entered the room, I thought about making small talk, about getting up, making eye contact, and performing an academic body that is not doing the forbidden activity of publicly lying down to rest at an academic conference in an academic space. Anything just to appear no longer resting now that my resting would be witnessed. Instead, she also lay down and we parallel rested in silence. 

Perhaps it was all these factors and more that simply created a sense that yes, despite the status quo of the university, I can rest. That sense is, I think, what Mia Mingus described as access-intimacy –“that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level” (May 5th, 2011). 

I’m reminded of Professors Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom’s presentation where they thought alongside la paperson’s thoughts about the decolonizing university that exists within a colonizing university wherein both decolonial work and colonial work operates in the same space-place (2017). Goodley and Lawthorn offered the idea that there exists a depathologizing university where work is done to complicate disability and matter disability experiences differently than what is offered by the pathologizing university which works to sustain ableistic systems of power both within itself and through knowledge production (July 30th, 2025). In this vein, the moments of access intimacy I listed above can be considered tiny depathologizing shifts within the pathologizing university through which my disabled-self felt that kind of elusive, eerie sense of comfort that Mingus named. And it was these shifts that allowed me to pause, and rest, despite resting being an extra-ordinary activity for an inhabitant of the pathologizing university. 

References

Crow, L. (2017). Lying down anyhow: Disability and the rebel body. In Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (pp. 42-292). Routledge.

Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education (p. 244). University of Michigan Press.

Goodley, D & Lawthom (July 30, 2025) Disability Matters to University Work.  Presented at the opening panel for Disability Matters∞ Ways of Perceiving: International Conversations.

la paperson, L. (2017). A third university is possible. University of Minnesota Press.

Mingus, M. (May 5th, 2011). Access Intimacy: the missing link. In Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/ 

Titchkosky, T. (2011). The question of access: Disability, space, meaning. University of Toronto Press.