Dr.in Veronika Kourabas
Language of the lecture: German
How can education be conceived when embodied experiences, chronic illness, and gender are placed not at the margins but at the center of epistemic inquiry?
This lecture develops a conceptual perspective on dis/ability, gender, and embodiment as socially situated, relational, and contested dimensions. It starts from the heuristic concept of Un_Broken Experience, which understands experiences of rupture, ambivalence, and irritation not as deficits or conditions to be overcome, but as constitutive dimensions of subjective experience within power-mediated social relations.
Drawing on approaches from educational research on difference and gender as well as from Disability Studies, the lecture explores how chronic, externally invisible illnesses challenge binary notions of health and illness, while simultaneously being entangled with normative expectations of gendered bodies. This brings both ableist and sexist knowledge structures into focus, particularly as they emerge in discourses surrounding chronic illness and its gendered codification.
Moreover, the lecture analyzes strategies of adaptation and (in)visibility from gender- and disability-informed perspectives — such as bodily self-practices that can be interpreted as ‘responses’ to normative demands around time, productivity, and corporeality.
The talk also examines forms of agency and resistance in living with ruptures and asks about the productive potential of ambivalence.
In conclusion, the lecture discusses how theory- and experience-based knowledge can be integrated into a critically theorizing framework for reflecting on gender, embodiment, and dis/ability — and how this integration can enrich a difference-reflexive educational science.
Dr. Veronika Kourabas
Hochschule Niederrhein