Research Statement

Synopsis of Scholarship

2020 – pres. (tenure-track [TT] appointment)

2 refereed digital multimodal publications
2 refereed invited digital interactive scholarly games
1 nonrefereed lyric essay memoir
1 refereed list essay (quoted at length in influential scholarship on antiracist assessment)
1 refereed coauthored open educational resource (OER) book chapter
2 nonrefereed coauthored introductions to award-winning journal special issues
3 refereed forthcoming book chapters
6 nonrefereed prose poems under review
1 in-progress webtext monograph
1 keynote address, 9 refereed presentations at national conferences, 4 nonrefereed invited university talks
1 award from Rutgers University School of Graduate Studies
1 award and 1 honorable mention from Kairos
1 award from disabled activist collective BORG.DIEM
1 awarded internal grant (Dyson Book Completion Award)

2018 – 20 (non-tenure-track [NTT] appointment)

1 refereed invited coauthored symposium essay
1 nonrefereed micro-memoir
1 refereed book chapter in award-winning edited collection
1 nonrefereed online resource list for technofeminist research (contributor)
1 nonrefereed invited literary reading (covered by mainstream news)
2 refereed presentations at national conferences, 6 acceptances (1 as panel co-organizer) at national conferences that were canceled due to COVID-19

Introduction: A Diasporic-Disabled Perspective

My work is situated at the intersection of writing studies, media studies, disability studies, and cultural studies. As an interdisciplinary transgenre scholar who considers her work "creative-critical," I integrate theory and methodology from all of these fields to (1) decenter Eurocentric scholarly knowledge-making traditions, which systematically privilege texts that are monosemiotic (using alphabets over other sign systems), monolingual (using one language), monogeneric (using one genre), and ocularcentrically monomodal (using one sensory mode, namely vision); and (2) develop culturally responsive, anti-ableist methods, poetics, and praxis for engaging in disability studies research and digital composition. My primary disciplinary contributions can be distilled to three entwined tenets: (1) for BIPOC, diasporic, and/or disabled scholars, chronic pain is embedded in Eurocentric rhetorical traditions, biomedical objectification, academic style, and institutional social reproduction; (2) what I call "repairing composition" — which enriches theorizations about textual production through the inclusion of taboo topics like torture, genocide, and intergenerational trauma — contends with the complicity of Eurocentric scholarly knowledge-making traditions and digital composition in perpetuating BIPOC, diasporic, and/or disabled pain; and (3) anti-racist, anti-ableist praxis necessitates investment in care work and divestment from neoliberal productivity imperatives and technocratic paradigms that saturate the biomedical pursuit of perfectible, work-ready bodies and the academic construction of creative and scholarly production and institutional processes.

The rhetorical conceptions and methodological orientations I use across my creative and scholarly work reflect my positionality as an Eelam Tamil American disabled scholar with chronic pain and fatigue, continually reconciling dominant Eurocentric standards with Tamil literacy frameworks, cultural attitudes toward anomalous embodiment, and intergenerational trauma. Tamil literacy frameworks assume that audiences derive pleasure from making meaning by actively working through a text in its entirety, including: bibliographic information; authorial identity; narrative, structural, and stylistic choices; and historical and environmental contingencies. Nondualist philosophies like அத்வைத (Advaita) frame composition as more than just textual output: it is all the diverse activities, sensory experiences, and resources that constitute the composition endeavor. The closest analogue to European rhetoric in ancient South Asian traditions is rasa, a theory of aesthetics, composition, and design that does not rely on intellectual appeals but on sensory, affective, and emotional persuasion through embodiment, evocation, and mediality. This multisensory, textual immersion unites several subfields in writing studies and disability studies, like embodied rhetorics, multimodal composition, interactive narrative, phenomenology, affect theory, and performance studies.

Chronic pain and fatigue further shape my understandings of composition and textual meaning as — like my bodymind — anomalous, relational, and contingent. Complementing the role of narrative methodologies in disability studies to resist invisibility and expendability, anti-ableist composition structurally and substantively centers the participation of the composer's bodymind (referencing the co-constituting nature of body and mind) in the writing process. From drafting to publication, traditional scholarly knowledge-making practices prioritize ableist genre conventions that imply a nondisabled bodymind, like linearity, normative temporality, disembodied language, and error-free prose and formatting. I write about chronic pain and express it through poetics and craft, using embodied rhetoric, nonlinearity, crip time, and intentional "glitches" in language, orthography, and (where applicable) code to visibly impact textual representations of knowledge and enact a chronically pained composition whose textual features emulate the experience of chronic pain as the object of research.

In one way or another, all of my work develops and enacts an Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled digital composition practice: characterized by a predisposition to language pluralism, interactivity, relationality, and boundary transgression and an attunement to difference, disruption, fluidity, instability of meaning, and the expressive possibilities of media and form. I have described this practice as "repairing composition" to extend Trammell's "repairing play," a Black phenomenology of play that begins with the idea that torture is play for BIPOC who share histories and experiences of racial violence. My work proposes a similar corrective: that torture also inheres in composition for BIPOC diasporic-disabled scholars whose experiences of racism and ableism are embedded in shared histories of colonization, ethnic chauvinism, and mass atrocity without justice or accountability. The elucidation of this idea can be traced through the body of my work, in arguments and analyses and the use of transgenre writing to harness "the 'sensory and affective possibilities' of research and inquiry, not only in terms of content, but as relevant to the ways we might expand ways of knowing through purposeful creative engagement with new ways to invent and make — to proliferate the possibility for — scholarly form(s)." Creative-critical writing demonstrates repairing composition by fusing the craft techniques of fiction and the disciplinary conventions of academic scholarship to preserve embodiment alongside markers of scholarly inquiry and theoretical rigor, using transmedial (unfolding across multiple media), multimodal (using multiple sensory modes), multilingual (code-switching or code-meshing), polysemiotic (using multiple sign systems), and relational (influenced by communal and geographic relationships) features to do so.

Finally, all of my work reflects a multifaceted commitment to social justice. In addition to the above, I write creatively about intergenerational trauma and Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict and engage in a vast amount of public writing as a scholar-activist, using it to transform theory into praxis and foster cross-movement solidarity. In this context especially, I understand composition as a social, collaborative act and have conducted research with students, department colleagues, and tenured, NTT, and contingent faculty at other institutions.

Publications and Presentations

From my NTT appointments (2018-20) through my TT appointment (2020-present) at Pace, I have consistently published in high-impact journals and edited collections and presented at prestigious conferences, even though NTT faculty at Pace are not required to engage in creative and scholarly activity. I have published work in competitive forums like The Paris Review, which has a 1% acceptance rate and is one of Duotrope's "Extremely Challenging Publishers"; Fourth Genre, which has a 2.61% acceptance rate and is one of Duotrope's "25 Most Challenging Nonfiction Publishers"; and Kairos, which has a 10% acceptance rate and is the premier open-access online journal of digital scholarship in rhetoric and composition. (Refer to the Impact Factor appendix for a complete analysis.) I have also given public literary readings that received mainstream news coverage and presented my research at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the flagship conference in rhetoric and composition with an acceptance rate of 20-30%, and Computers and Writing (C&W), the primary conference for computers and composition, among other nationally recognized conferences. Due to the prestige and selectivity of these talks, the quality of these presentations equals that of refereed journal articles and book chapters; therefore, I have included them below. Additionally, I have included work produced during my NTT appointments as evidence of an overall trajectory of creative and scholarly activity and of my commitment to knowledge building, craft, and advocacy.

For the sake of clarity, I have organized my work into three categories: "Repairing Composition," "Scholarship on the Field and Pedagogy," and "Writing for Social Justice," including future directions for each of these thematic strands. However, in all dimensions of my work, I explore, analyze, and enact how my Tamil heritage and chronic pain participate in clinical encounters and composition by using key methodologies and theories in cultural rhetoric, medical rhetoric, disability studies, and digital media studies. I draw on and experiment with multimodal design and transgenre storytelling as part of a diasporic-disabled commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional Eurocentric knowledge-making practices through Advaita and rasa aesthetics. I also engage with how we teach rhetoric and composition and interdisciplinary, transgenre methods to encourage instructors to adopt decolonizing, restorative pedagogies that legitimize alternate modes of being, thinking, and writing, critiquing academic habitus and violent, extractive economies of academic labor in the process.

Repairing Composition

Repairing composition as I have developed it so far encompasses racialized, evocative, pained, and painful diasporic-disabled writing and is most apparent in the following webtexts, which use Tamil literacy frameworks and digital interactive media to represent and analyze culturally specific experiences of chronic pain, intergenerational trauma, medical gaslighting, and academic ableism, and reveal audience complicity in perpetuating oppression.

Publications

Manivannan, V. (2025). Pain and relief come of themselves. Peitho, 27(2): Photo archive of medical and cultural objects with parables describing physical and spiritual pain.
Manivannan, V. (2025). perimortem (in [theoretical] rigor). Kairos, 29(2): Inform 7 parser game that examines torture in digital composition and play and includes process reflections. (Excerpted for my 2024 C&W keynote)
Manivannan, V. (2023). Hollow me, hollow me, until only you remain. Spark, 4: Texture Writer word-on-word "translation" game rhetorically analyzing medical rhetoric in my ER patient records. (Received Honorable Mention for Kairos Award for Best Webtext)
Manivannan, V. (2022). This is about the body, the mind, the academy, the clinic, time, and pain [Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University]: Multimodal webtext totaling 255,146 words and 5.5 hours of interactive content with multiple pathways to completion that examines discourses around BIPOC chronic pain, biomedical logics of capture and cure, and Eurocentric, ableist imperatives of academic style. (Received School of Graduate Studies Distinguished Scholarly Achievement Award)
Manivannan, V. (2022). The successful text is not always the one that murders me to protect you. In A. Knoblauch & M. Moeller (Eds.), Bodies of knowledge: Embodied rhetorics in theory and practice. Utah State University Press: Book chapter using a nonlinear bulleted list, footnotes, and orthographic play to embody the experience of Eelam Tamil American fibromyalgic composition.
Manivannan, V. (2020). "But you look so well!": The role of dress practices in (un)professionalizing the expression and experience of chronic pain. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, 3(2): Webtext composed with Scalar, which permits media annotation and nested, recursive, nonlinear formats, to simulate the difficulties of balancing pain and professionalism as an Eelam Tamil American fibromyalgic professor.

Conference Activity

Manivannan, V. (2025). Narrating generative AI refusal. C&W, Athens, GA: Autoethnographic critique of uncritical AI adoption in the field.
Manivannan, V. (2025). AI and the enshittification of writing. CCCC, Baltimore, MD: Critique of AI's homogenization of writing, which makes nontraditional, intentional experimentation — and diasporic-disabled composition — seem AI-generated.
Manivannan, V. (2024). perimortem (in [theoretical] rigor). C&W, Fort Worth, TX: Keynote address about torture in digital composition and play.
Manivannan, V. (2024). If to move the soul a writer. CCCC, Spokane, WA: 16-bit game demonstrating classical Indian aesthetics and diasporic-disabled composition.
Manivannan, V. (2024). Aiyo, eylaathu: Composing with chronic pain and fatigue when you just #$%ing can’t. Rutgers Ph.D. Colloquium, Online: Diasporic-disabled digital composition practices in my dissertation.
Manivannan, V. (2023). Ocularcentrism, intergenerational trauma, and the Euro-American composition of Eelam Tamil pain. CCCC, Chicago, IL: Critique of the absence of pain—especially racialized, spiritual pain—in writing research and pedagogy.
Manivannan, V. (2022). The successful text is not always the one that murders me to protect you. Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), Baltimore, MD: Reading of book chapter excerpts.
Manivannan, V. (2022). Peyththai and image-making: Cripping chronic pain the Tamil way. Universities Art Association of Canada, Toronto, CAN: Analysis of anti-ableist visual traditions in ancient South Asian mythic art.
Manivannan, V. (2020). The aesthetics still matter: The ethics of simulating pain in digital scholarship. C&W, Greenville, NC: Canceled due to COVID-19.
Manivannan, V. (2020). Poetics, praxis, and social justice: Reconfiguring epistemologies of pain as sites of collaborative invention. CCCC, Milwaukee, WI: Panel co-chair, canceled due to COVID-19.
Manivannan, V. (2020). Embodied rhetoric: The body on/in/as text. RSA, Portland, OR: Canceled due to COVID-19.

Forthcoming and Future Work

Manivannan, V. (2025). Restoring poetics to scholarship, / disturbing academic style with / counterstory, allays the tamil / thirst for homeland. In S. Christiansen, Z. Tian, & S. Canagarajah (Eds.), Decolonizing academic writing through translingualism. Routledge: Book chapter on translingual, transgenre writing in the form of ancient Tamil verse.
Manivannan, V. (WIP). This machine is merciless if its sustenance is you. In M. Fernandes & M. McIntyre (Eds.), Unprompted: Pedagogies, theories, and futures of GenAI refusal in rhetoric and writing studies: Accepted proposal for edited collection on AI refusal in writing studies.
Manivannan, V. (WIP). ஐேயா/AIYO: Webtext monograph on Eelam Tamil American diasporic-disabled digital composition, intergenerational trauma, and medical and academic racism and ableism. (Received Dyson Book and Performance Completion Award; invited to submit on completion to Computers and Composition Digital Press)

Scholarship on the Field and Pedagogy

My work also addresses pedagogical, disciplinary, and institutional issues in the field. I use my diasporic-disabled positionality and prior experiences in academia to innovate and endorse capacious models of composition, writing pedagogy, assessment, editorial service, and professional expectations, including the need to value multimodality, crip time, and care work.

Publications

Manivannan, V., Osorio, R., & Male, J. (2022). I tell these stories / living through a pandemic / and / what a gift / the modes of meaning-making / a readied knife / to create what should be / in a logic of care / so far from a singular benefit / the resilience of over one hundred writers / a calibration of shared memory / at a new time / not attempting exorcisms / witnessing other people's pain / unimaginable in academia / this project / the most challenging part / we can't do it alone. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, 7(1): Editors' introduction to award-winning special issue "Carework and Writing During COVID: Part II," connecting carework, labor, and the ongoing work of disrupting academic norms.
Manivannan, V., Osorio, R., & Male, J. (2022). First, an opening: "What counts" as academic writing & disrupting academic norms. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, 6(2): Editors' introduction to award-winning special issue "Carework and Writing During COVID: Part I," critiquing the definition of "legitimate" scholarly writing.
Cadman, D., Manivannan, V., & Mundy, R. (2022). Interdisciplinary writing instructors teach autoethnographic creativity and social consciousness. In J. Daniel-Wariya (Ed)., Who teaches writing? Open OKState Publishing: OER chapter coauthored with department colleagues, deﬁning autoethnography as a decolonial methodology and instructing students on using it for research.
Manivannan, V. (2019). "Maybe she can be a feminist and still claim her own opinions?": The story of an accidental counter-troll. In E. Sparby & J. Reyman (Eds.), Digital ethics: Rhetoric and responsibility in online aggression. Routledge: Book chapter reflecting on how bigoted assumptions about my identity shielded me from being targeted by *chan trolls over my digital aggression research. (Edited collection won the 2019 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award)
Adler-Kassner, L., Cox, A., Elston, M., García de Müeller, G., Kumari, A., Manivannan, V., Miller- Cochran, S., Moroski, K., Olejnik, M., O'Neill, P., Poe, M., Powell, A., Reid, S., & Roundtree, S. (2019). Building a twenty-ﬁrst-century feminist ethos: Three dialogues for WPAs. In E. Wardle & M. LaFrance (Eds.), WPA: Writing Program Administration, 42(2): Coauthored and annotated article by rhetoricians across ranks, demonstrating the importance of relationality in engaging with disciplinary and pedagogical issues like precarity, ableism, racism, and misogyny.

Conference Activity

Manivannan, V. (2023). Writing (or not) on crip time. Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism (DISCO) Network, Online: Invited roundtable talk about composing with chronic pain and fatigue.
Manivannan, V. (2023). Carework and editing during COVID: Reflections on being a disabled guest editor. Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, San Francisco, CA: Reflections on the division of labor and use of content tags to accommodate the needs of everyone on the special issue editorial team.
Manivannan, V. (2022). Soliciting and publishing multimodal mess as digital activism. C&W, Online: Reflections on the experience of soliciting nontraditional, multimodal writing for "Carework and Writing During COVID." (Panel co-chair)
Manivannan, V. (2022). Crip mentoring, access advocacy, and the job market. DISCO Network, Online: Invited roundtable talk about navigating the job market as a disabled graduate student.
Mundy, R., Manivannan, V., Cadman, D., Gonzalaz, T., & Suskewicz, J. (2022). Dismantling architectures of power: On collaboration and implementation in labor and assessment schemas. CCCC, Online: Presentation with department colleagues about scaling labor-based grading across our core writing program while ensuring an equitable distribution of labor.
Manivannan, V. (2020). Intersectional feminism and digital aggression: Research experiences and approaches. Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CFSHRC), Online: Invited roundtable talk about the perils of conducting digital aggression research as a BIPOC woman.

Work in Progress

Cedillo, C., Manivannan, V., Hubrig, A., & Olivas, B. (Under contract with UP Colorado). Embodying (in)adequacy: "Good enough" as a blow against the meritocratic regime. In T. Oleksiak & J. Barsczewski (Eds.), Adequate: Narrative about racialized and ableist labor expectations in academic work: Book chapter equating adequacy with success as an antithesis to academic neoliberalism.
Manivannan, V. (Under review with WAC Clearinghouse). Pain disclosures, practices, and pedagogy in the writing classroom. In A. Hubrig & P. Ready (Eds.), Anti-ableist composition: Writing studies and accessibility in "unprecedented times": Book chapter about pain and writing pedagogy that includes a process reflection and classroom activity involving mindfulness, mudras, and writing.

Writing for Social Justice

I also use creative writing and public writing to engage in social justice and advocacy work regarding the Tamil genocide and racism, ableism, and sexism in academic and biomedical institutions. This work ranges from lyric essays articulating my experience of intergenerational trauma before, during, and after the 2009 Mullivaikkal Massacre to Twitter threads about living, teaching, and writing with fibromyalgia as a graduate student and professor. My social media critiques of racist, ableist, misogynistic, and colonial discourse in medicine and academia have been well-received in academic and disabled spaces. Writing published on social media and open-source repositories does not typically contribute toward tenure and promotion, but this work is time- and labor-intensive, reaches wider audiences, and invites dialogue and collaboration. According to Hsu and Nish, "None of the CV lines matter, ultimately, if we are not fostering conditions of mutual thriving."

Publications

Manivannan, V. (2025). Chaos itself is an order. Fourth Genre: 25 Essays from Our First 25 Years: Lyric essay republished in "best of" anthology.
Manivannan, V. (2021). Chaos itself is an order. Fourth Genre, 23(2): Lyric essay about the Tamil genocide, visual discourse, and intergenerational trauma.
Manivannan, V. (2024 Jun 22). Thoughts after delivering #cwcon #kn1, a 🧵. Twitter: (1,264 impressions, 67 engagements)
Manivannan, V. (2024 May 12). #StillSickStillFighting. Twitter: (5,237 impressions, 115 engagements)
Manivannan, V. (2024). If to move the soul a writer: Github-hosted game featuring a kolam design and two sides (public and private) of a single narrative about existing as a diasporic-disabled composer in academia. (Excerpt presented at CCCC 2024)
Manivannan, V. (2022 Sep 19). My chronic pain and fatigue make in-person protest impossible for me. Twitter: (4,057 impressions, 247 engagements)
Manivannan, V. (2021 Aug 22). CW: medical PTSD, shit, a 🧵. Twitter: (2,483 impressions, 206 engagements)
Manivannan, V. (2021 Jun 9). As a grad student, creative writer, professor... #NEISVoid #DisabilityTwitter. Twitter: (667 impressions, 53 engagements)

Work in Progress

Manivannan, V. && you promised you would live: Selections from in-progress prose poetry chapbook (under review with The New Yorker, Harper's, The Verge, American Scholar, A Public Space, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares)
Manivannan, V. Black Tiger White Van: Creative nonfiction memoir about intergenerational trauma related to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict and the 2009 Tamil genocide.