My writing, teaching, and service activities revolve around disability studies, decoloniality, affect theory, postmodernism, visual discourse, and transgressive digital subcultures. Methodologically, I gravitate to fictocritical autoethnography, digital “repairing play” (Trammell, 2023), code-meshed transgenre writing, and multimodal, lyric forms to reconceptualize composition and work toward accessible, socially just futurities.
I’m particularly interested in how Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled embodiment, genocide-related intergenerational trauma, and “survival media” (Perera, 2016) composition—including a culturally specific poetics of chronic pain—converge and conflict with Eurocentric rhetorical traditions and ocularnormativity, biomedical technologies and curative logic, and academic habitus and style, constructing and mediating BIPOC disabled bodyminds in the process.
By extension, a central conceit of my writing, teaching, and praxis is that institutions are inherently self-serving, and any and all conversations about reimagining academia, the literary industry, or the biomedical complex must start from a place of political refusal and the desire to innovate outside of the colonial wound that keeps these systems sated.
In 2008, I finished my M.F.A. amidst the disarrangements of fibromyalgia (FMS) and chronic fatigue (ME/CFS), hard-won diagnoses I received in my fourth semester after 1.5 years of debilitating symptoms. Completing my M.F.A. was an exercise in relentless experimentation: with what I was writing, how to sustain a writing practice, how to tactically survive in academia, how I was medically and socially treated.
By 2011, I’d been teaching first-year writing for five years when I presented as an independent scholar at Computers & Writing for the first time and realized there was a place for my disparate interests in digital aggression, interactive narrative, digital storytelling, and decolonial praxis.
I started my Ph.D. program that fall, with the goal of studying trolling and digital cunning, and with minor, manageable medical disruptions, until my appendix began (unbeknownst to me) chronically perforating in January 2014. It’s a familiar chorus: no one believed that something was wrong. While internally leaking and fusing, I saw doctors; I commuted, taught, read, wrote; I passed my qualifying exams; I went on the job market; I designed new courses.
In September, it fully ruptured. I wrote my will and waited for a death that never came. I got up the next day and resumed working, until I found a physician three weeks later who sent me to the ER.
Even then, I was told it couldn’t be appendicitis; I wasn’t in enough pain. Another familiar chorus, along with this one: I got lucky. The surgeon on rotation was South Asian American, understood fibromyalgia, and agreed to an exploratory laparoscopy, which ended up being life-saving. I woke up with a belly of scar tissue. Everyone whose hands I passed through to arrive at that point said, impressed, “I don’t know how you’re alive.”
After that, my bodymind demanded renewed hypervigilance. I was in survival mode, and my doctoral studies seemed irrelevant. Again, I got lucky: with an advisor who allowed me to start over, and to forge my path and dissertation intuitively. And so, I brought my earlier research focuses to my new interests in disability studies, medical rhetoric, cultural studies, and affect theory, and I let my composition process stray further and further from traditional scholarship. Eventually, this work brought me to the diasporic-disabled praxis and ethos of care I bring to my composition practice, my pedagogy, and my disability justice work in and out of academia.
Anyone who knows me, personally or professionally, knows this story, because—like chronic illness had years before—it irrevocably altered my career trajectory. You can locate aspects of it in everything I do.
I built this site using both the Bricks visual editor and hand-coded elements. The title font is Movement, an open-source typeface inspired by dance movements designed by Noel Pretorius and María Ramos, and Jost*, an open-source font designed by indestructible type*.
This site serves as a portfolio for most of my work; texts too large to house here may be found on my Github page (also linked in the footer). The Notes (blog) entries share work in progress, informal writing, and material I’ve migrated from older, now-defunct sites.
All content on this site, as well as the site itself, is created without the use of AI.
The content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA; updates are timestamped; and I use 6 tags to structure it: longform, shortform, courses, talks, resources, news.
Vyshali, a Tamil woman with a curly black faux hawk, stands smiling in a subway car with open doors, wearing a black skater dress with leather trim, purple glasses, and brass ladder earrings. This photo was taken after qualifying exams, months into appendicitis. Photo credit: © 2014 Sara Fuller
I often deliver guest lectures in classes where my work has been assigned, and I’ve held faculty workshops and one-on-one consultations on unwellness, social justice and accountability, and improving conference/event access. Want to make trouble together? For speaking engagements; collaborations; interviews; requests for PDFs, advising, manuscript review, consulting; and/or general questions, contact me by completing the form below.