This book is framed as a memoir of the author''s journey through a cancer diagnosis and resulting impairments, as he continued his teaching and research activities during and after medical procedures. The narrative weaves together theoretical debates, textual analyses, and ethnographic data from communicative practices to redefine language competence.
The book demonstrates:
- the generative and resistant value of human vulnerability
- the importance of vulnerability in motivating engagement with social networks and material ecologies for productive thinking, communication, and community
- the role of relational ethics in social and communicative life
- a decolonizing orientation to disability studies and language competence.
While language competence was traditionally defined as mentally internalized grammatical knowledge for individual mastery of communication, this book demonstrates the need for distributed, ethical, and embodied practi
