Leanne Oden

I truly feel that my connection to Virginia Woolf and reading her words of survival became my own survival guides for navigating my illness with bipolar disorder. When I was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis and bipolar 1 disorder in 2018, I found this incredible connection to Woolf, who experienced similar challenges with what we understand today as manic depression. At that moment when I was learning I had this condition, her words became my lifeline. I saw this condition as an opportunity and as a source of empowerment for myself and what I could do to help other people in the same position as me. It's been nothing short of an opportunity for me to be more human, to feel my heart, to know myself truly. And that is what I bring to my research and to my teaching. I work with this idea of the metaphorical garden - you are not what happened to you, you are the garden you grow from it. This outlook gives us an outlet for expression of our pain and struggles in a way that empowers us rather than defeats us. Recovery is a garden, it's an ecosystem, with more than one factor influencing the conditions for growth, and they work in combination with one another. The real challenge is to give with sincerity the consideration that it might just work out, to truly and earnestly absorb the possibility that it might just work out, and that rather than being a story of defeat, our story can be one of overcoming.

I want people to know that if they feel excluded by higher education, if they feel that they don't have a place here at the table, they absolutely do. We need more people with this life experience, with these engagements with illness or disability in academia. We need many more of us in higher education. I want to show them that this feeling of resilience that can't be taken away from you is possible, and they deserve to feel it. The fear, the shame, the guilt - it thrives in silence. It absolutely thrives in silence, so I like to be loud. I am here, and I want others standing here with me. We must have courage and share our stories and listen to one another's, and that is how we grow our gardens. That is how we overcome these challenges. You have the power to use your voice and see your condition or experience as an opportunity and as a source of empowerment for yourself and what you could do to help other people. Together, we can be a beacon of light for others and show them that resilience is possible.

My research asks: Who gets to be legible? Who gets to narrate their own experience? And how have disability categories been socially constructed in ways that silence the very people they claim to describe? As a disability studies researcher, I follow the social model and understand that when language operates as a sort of fill-in for the thing itself, we realize there's this wonderful nuance and incredible opportunity where we are not limited by our labels or categories, that they are sort of reductive in nature, and that the onus really is placed on the environment that labels individuals as such and categorizes us as such. I return to modernist women and their authentic experiences navigating these challenges, particularly at the dawn of psychiatry, and I'm really interested in the ways that psychiatry as a field was developing and influenced the way that we read texts. I look at the tools of a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst and put them in conversation with the tools of a life writer, questioning who has authority and control of the narrative. As someone who has received a diagnosis, I understand how quickly a person can be reduced to a chart, a code, a symptom list. Yet I also know the power of reclaiming voice. Academia, at its best, can be a site of access and amplification. At its worst, it can exclude those whose bodies or minds move differently. I am committed to expanding that access. The biggest challenge is that we need more of us in academia, more people with lived experience of disability in higher education, and we need to reach others who feel excluded from higher education.

Stories are our survival guides. You are not what happened to you, you are the garden you grow from it. I work with this metaphorical garden that gives us an outlet for expression of our pain and struggles in a way that empowers us rather than defeats us. This outlook is so closely tied to my experiences with postpartum complications and my bipolar 1 disorder diagnosis. Recovery is a garden, it's an ecosystem, with more than one factor influencing the conditions for growth, and they work in combination with one another. I believe we must have courage and share our stories and listen to one another's, and that is how we grow our gardens, how we overcome these challenges. The fear, the shame, the guilt - it thrives in silence, so I like to be loud. I want to use my voice and see this condition as an opportunity and as a source of empowerment for myself and what I could do to help other people in the same position as me. I center accessibility and nurture in my pedagogy, bringing what I've learned to be more human, to feel my heart, to know myself truly. That is what I bring to my research and to my teaching. I want to reach other people, to be a beacon of light, and show them that resilience is possible and they deserve to feel it.