I have now had the experience, in several settings, of being deeply uncomfortable when securely employed academics make the joke that the vaccine is a good excuse to take a day off. I cannot tell you how immensely aggravating and heartbreaking this line of thought is. https://twitter.com/HannahntheWolf/status/1391811072496078849

For one thing, it assumes that we all have and have had the same capacity to work and to take time off work throughout this pandemic. For another, it assumes that all other reasons to stop work are competing with the pandemic and not extensions of the same structural violence.

And most injuriously, it is predicated upon the belief that working ourselves into the ground is otherwise inescapable. Academics are baseline expected to be working at all times, any failure to do so is a refusal of its cult of identity and the ethos of hyper-ability

which breeds exceptionalism as the solution to the structural problems of capitalism. This hyper ability can play itself out in DIE initiatives and on the back of BIPOC scholars recruited in cluster hires--

especially if there is no collective willingness to shift the distribution of DIE work away from racialized scholars and at the same time to challenge systemic overwork. Without a challenge to hyper-ability exceptionalism continues the disciplinary logic of the university.

My experience of chronic illness is days spent working to get better in order to then do the work I couldn't do. So the notion of time off is one I don't often employ, choosing words instead like rest, or usually refusal, of capitalism's demand for capacity.

The outgrowths of illness as excuse are many and have rooted their way into so much about academic work culture including the DIE complex and the deferral to the medical industrial complex on including disabled body-minds. These are carceral logics and we have to get rid of them.

Tl;DR challenging the compulsory ableism of academic (over)work is work against the neoliberal University's cooptation (and exclusion by exhaustion) of racialized bodies in DIE initiatives and medicalized accommodation models.