Join Dr. Mimi Khúc for Two Upcoming Events – March 2025 


The Consortium is excited to announce two events hosted by Dr. Mimi Khúc coming this March! Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of the mental health projects Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot, and the author of dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, a deep dive into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.

If you are interested in attending, please click on the embedded links and RSVP to our form. Look forward to seeing you there!

 

Talk: March 31st, 4:00 pm – 5:15 pm

Touring the Abyss with dear elia: Unwellness and Care in the University

Join Dr. Mimi Khúc as she shares her work on unwellness and the university from her new book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Applying her framework of a “pedagogy of unwellness,” Dr. Khúc explores the contours of student and faculty unwellness and locates it within the racialized ableism of meritocracy that undergirds university life (and beyond). Academic hyperproductivity across university strata is a kind of unrelenting dehumanization that relies on something she names “compulsory wellness”—the pressure to always pretend you are ok and achieve at the highest levels. We in the university live and work in a machine that makes us unwell while not allowing us to be unwell and punishes us for being unwell and asks us to punish others for being unwell so that we can prove we are well. Join this event to explore together how to disinvest in this form of university wellness and begin to build structures of care that we need.

 

Tarot for the Apocalypse: Collective Care in Times of Unwellness (i.e. All the Fucking Time)

What do we need in times of unwellness? What kinds of care can we imagine and build for ourselves if we engage our unwellness in new ways? Facilitated by Dr. Mimi Khúc, this interactive workshop will use the Asian American Tarot to explore mental health and the social, cultural, and structural forces that shape it, engaging critical arts approaches that provide new vocabularies for both what hurts and how we might care for what hurts, together.