Cross-Disciplinarity as a Practice of Critical Linking: How Does a Scholar Relate Different ‘Bodies’? Writing from Within the Body as a Research Process

Legal academic writing seldom reflects on its choice of research topic and writing style. The published text rarely incorporates thoughts about the choice of genre or format, and their fit with the research question itself. This chapter observes its own pre-writing process rather than making an argument or a claim as most academic writings do. An injury made me discard my initial plan for the chapter, and the notion of the ‘body’, which the editors had assigned me as the object of a hypothetical interdisciplinary study, became the material subject of the writing process itself. Experiencing bodily constraints changed my reading practice and necessitated different media and writing strategies. The resulting text is a personal record of reading and thinking in a particular period of time.