Creative-Critical Writing

As an interdisciplinary creative-critical scholar, I integrate theory and methodology from writing studies and its adjacent fields—including media studies, cultural studies, creative writing, and multimodal design—to (1) develop culturally specific, anti-ableist methods for engaging in disability studies research and digital composition; (2) explore the role of anomalous embodiment in composition practice; and (3) decenter Eurocentric scholarly knowledge-making traditions, which is monosemiotic (using alphabets over other sign systems), monolingual (using one language per text), monomodal (preferring visual over other sensory modes), and monogeneric (using one genre per text). 

Tamil literacy frameworks, which inform my view of writing, assume that readers derive pleasure from actively working to make meaning by searching the whole text, including words, embodied context, title, authorial identity, and typographic and orthographic choices. Thus, my heritage writing style employs indirection rather than formulaic structures, step-by-step logic, or clear signposting. Nondualistic philosophies like அத்வைத (advaita) frame composition as more than just textual output: it is all the diverse activities, sensory experiences, and resources that constitute the compositional endeavor, unlike Eurocentric scholarship (Canagarajah, 2023). 

My Tamil understanding of writing, embodiment, and relationality is compounded by my chronic illnesses, which reconstructed my life circumstances as anomalously embodied, relational, and contingent. My research combines the craft techniques of fiction with theoretical rigor to interrogate the boundaries of academic knowledge-making and challenge writing studies researchers to reconceive of composition as embodied (produced by body and mind), potentially polysemiotic (using multiple sign systems), multilingual (code-meshing), multimodal (using multiple sensory modes), and relational (drawing on communal and geographic relationships).

My creative and scholarly activity seeks to decolonize the experience of academic work and chronic illness in the U.S. by examining the Eelam Tamil American cultural disposition toward pain and its affective and linguistic expressions. 

In all dimensions of my work, I explore, analyze, and enact how my Tamil heritage and chronic pain participate in clinical encounters and in the activity of writing and teaching writing by using key methodologies and theories in cultural rhetoric, medical rhetoric, disability studies, and digital media studies. I have also published scholarship on writing pedagogy and transgenre writing to encourage instructors to adopt decolonizing, restorative pedagogies that legitimize alternate modes of being, thinking, and writing in the classroom, critiqued academic habitus and violent, extractive economies of academic labor.

Finally, as Hsu and Nish (2023) note, “None of the CV lines matter, ultimately, if we are not fostering conditions of mutual thriving.” As part of an art as atrocity prevention agenda, I regularly write creatively about intergenerational trauma and Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, and as a scholar-activist, I engage in a vast amount of public writing, using it to transform theory into praxis and foster cross-movement solidarity.