This post is a part of The COVID Chronicles series. This series is dedicated to giving voice to graduate student experiences and needs during the course of the pandemic. It is a space for graduate students to come together, to share, to listen, to reflect, to empathize, to lament, and to learn from one another. We hope that faculty and administrators will listen to and engage in dialogue with graduate students, and act in ways to help support the graduate student community.
I know my title isn’t about COVID-19, but my most life-altering event happened well before the current crisis began. Two summers ago, I started experiencing daily pain, fatigue, and other unexplained symptoms. Last year, I finally found an explanation, but little relief: I have fibromyalgia, a chronic condition with no known cure. This is my story of being a graduate student with a chronic illness during COVID-19.
At first, lockdown made me feel weirdly better. Meetings, talks, and teaching were suddenly online and therefore, more accessible to me, even on my worst days. Moreover, I no longer felt ashamed of being too exhausted to leave my home, since everyone else was similarly housebound. The whole world was practicing physical distancing; I wasn’t alone.
Unfortunately, I soon saw my non-disabled friends and colleagues switch into productivity overdrive. Lockdown became a time to challenge oneself: to do more writing, harder workouts, or learn to bake. As soon as I felt able to catch up and make progress through graduate school, the bar for success was raised astronomically. All my feelings of inadequacy and isolation returned, magnified by their brief absence.
But then, we entered the Black Lives Matter stage of lockdown, and in addition to much needed calls for anti-racist activism, I saw many of my fellow philosophers holding space for the disabled and chronically ill—those of us who couldn’t be on the streets marching, but who could participate in other ways. Rather than being hyper-focused on our failings, we were encouraged to take on equally essential forms of activism: making donations, writing letters to politicians, and having difficult conversations with family and friends. Even rest itself became coded as a form of resistance to the racist, misogynistic, and imperialistic pressures to constantly produce—providing me a powerful way to reframe the days I spend sleeping and recovering my strength.
BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and disability justice activists have long been imagining a more genuinely inclusive future. It’s time for academics to follow their lead, and the first step towards creating accessible graduate education in Philosophy is to start asking new questions:
- Beyond extending deadlines for coursework and grading, how can we limit workload and long hours on the computer that exhaust all graduate students, but especially those who experience migraines, joint pain, and other chronic conditions?
- As course instructors and discussion leaders, how can we meet the needs of our undergraduate students without becoming overburdened by a constant barrage of emails and meetings—a workload issue for all graduate students, but especially those who experience conditions like autism, attention disorders, and PTSD?
- How do we ease the growing mental health crisis among graduate students—a problem magnified by the abysmal job market, and further exacerbated by disability, race, gender-identity, sexuality, and class marginalization?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I hope that we can use lockdown as an opportunity to make progress towards a more accessible version of academic Philosophy: one where people like me can become essential—not expendable—teachers, students, and scholars.
Emma McClure
Emma McClure is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, they were inspired to write this post by conversations with fellow graduate students and early career scholars: Kayla Wiebe, Lisa McKeown, C. Dalrymple-Fraser, Jessica Wright, Mark Fortney, Joshua Brandt, Howard Williams, and her co-authors on the APA blog post where they originally raised these questions, Arianna Falbo and Heather Stewart.
