© Kameelah Janan Rasheed. All rights reserved.
[1]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2021)
I mean learning as a process of radical slowing down/deceleration in the context of almost compulsory acceleration under the current conditions; an attentiveness to a velocity that allows for a patient and close reading; an engagement with curiosity, serendipity, improvisation, and tangents. Learning is a persistent reminder of the shifting ecologies of what it means to know something.
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[3a]: “Semitic Root,” Wikipedia, last modified November 14, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root
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[3b]: “Project Root List,” StudyQuran, accessed November 16, 2025, https://studyquran.org/PRL/PRLonline.htm
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[3c]: Wehr, Hans. A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic-English. 4th rev. ed. Edited by J. Milton Cowan. Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1976.
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[4a]: Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. United States: New Directions, 2012.
[4b]: Acheampong, Michelle, “Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Learning and Unlearning,” Art in America, July 1, 2021.
[4c]: Syllables of Velvet” and “Sentences of Plush” in Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s 1862 letter to Eudocia C. Flynt.
[4d]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2023)
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[5a]: Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. United States: W. W. Norton, 2019.; Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s Letters (The Atlantic, 1862, L271 and L265)
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[5b]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2023; 2021)
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[6]: Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. United States: New Directions, 2012.
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[7]: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s Letters (The Atlantic, 1862, L271 and L265)
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[8]: Renee Gladman and Fred Moten: One Long Black Sentence. United States: Image Text Ithaca, 2020.
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[9]: Imamura, “Escape Velocity,” last modified (n.d.), University of Oregon, accessed November 15, 2025, https://pages.uoregon.edu/imamura/121/lecture-4/escape.html
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[10]: Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997
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[11]: “Multisensory integration — Neuroscience.” ScienceDirect. Accessed December 1, 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/multisensory-integration.
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[12]: Ware, Rudolph T.., Ware, Rudolph T.. The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. United States: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.; Nieber, Hanna. 2024. “Authority with Textual Materials – Power of the Written Qur’an.” Material Religion 20 (1): 51–72. doi:10.1080/17432200.2024.2303905.
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[13]: Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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[14]: Groom, Amelia. Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins. United Kingdom: MIT Press, 2021.
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[15]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2020)
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[16]: Gladman, Renee. Calamities. United States: Wave Books, 2020.
While texting with a friend and interlocutor for another project, I mentioned that the compositional field of Google Docs felt restrictive. I wanted to swell beyond the compositional field of the word processor, as I wanted to exceed the page, so I went to the walls. Across three frantic messages, I shared 
In this meandering, she asked if I’d heard of Renee Gladman’s “commotional field” in Calamities (2016). I had not. To be honest, I felt betrayed, not from this friend, but of myself. I’d purchased Calamities years ago, and in working my way through a stack of books, I had not reached the shore of this text. I grabbed the book off my “need to read” shelf and began to read frantically. The commotion is riotous and disobedient. The compositional field refuses to settle. A compositional field speaks to the environment in which the writing occurs. Gladman’s articulation is almost an exponential expansion – that the compositional field has energy and affordances.
How to Cite this Page: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan. “Work Statement: slow and sprawling,.” KJR Studios Website. Accessed Month Day, Year. https://kameelahr.com/Work-Statement-sprawling
I am a learner [1] and a death doula [2] in training.
My middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic trilateral root [3a] (J-N-N / جنان) [3b][3c], evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward.
Accordingly, I explore the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual language.
I examine the materiality[4a, b, c, d] of wayward [5a ,b] language: acrobatic sentences [6] (Clarice Lispector); anarchic stanzas with no recognized monarch [7] (Emily Elizabeth Dickinson); phrases with trapdoors or underground railroads [8] (Fred Moten); runaway syllables that scatter to the marooned edges of a page; words that escape the orbit [9] of their mother sentence; footnotes that consume their reference; and ecstatic outbursts that dissipate before being recorded.
ectopic[10] —language?
Wayward language-making invites errant[11] and multisensory [12] reading rituals from the ingestion and metabolization of the written word as practiced in some West African Islamic communities [13] to embodied and ergodic [14] reading in which the whole body is activated as a reading instrument by moving through language-saturated environments.
Cixous, Hélène., Lispector, Clarice. Reading with Clarice Lispector. United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Lispector, Clarice. The passion according to G.H.. United States: University of Minnesota Press, 1988
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts : thresholds of interpretation. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
I have an expansive relationship with disorganization, unintelligibility, and noise [15] due to these wayward language-making and reading practices. The page (or other substrate[16]) is a landscape of instability with its own lifecycle: an active, “materially vulnerable” (Amelia Groom) [17], vibratory [18] “commotional field” [19] (Renee Gladman).
[1]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2021)
I mean learning as a process of radical slowing down/deceleration in the context of almost compulsory acceleration under the current conditions; an attentiveness to a velocity that allows for a patient and close reading; an engagement with curiosity, serendipity, improvisation, and tangents. Learning is a persistent reminder of the shifting ecologies of what it means to know something.
︎
︎
[3a]: “Semitic Root,” Wikipedia, last modified November 14, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root
︎
[3b]: “Project Root List,” StudyQuran, accessed November 16, 2025, https://studyquran.org/PRL/PRLonline.htm
︎
[3c]: Wehr, Hans. A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic-English. 4th rev. ed. Edited by J. Milton Cowan. Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1976.
︎
[4a]: Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. United States: New Directions, 2012.
[4b]: Acheampong, Michelle, “Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Learning and Unlearning,” Art in America, July 1, 2021.
[4c]: Syllables of Velvet” and “Sentences of Plush” in Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s 1862 letter to Eudocia C. Flynt.
[4d]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2023)
︎
[5a]: Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. United States: W. W. Norton, 2019.; Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s Letters (The Atlantic, 1862, L271 and L265)
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[5b]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2023; 2021)
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[6]: Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. United States: New Directions, 2012.
︎
[7]: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s Letters (The Atlantic, 1862, L271 and L265)
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[8]: Renee Gladman and Fred Moten: One Long Black Sentence. United States: Image Text Ithaca, 2020.
︎
[9]: Imamura, “Escape Velocity,” last modified (n.d.), University of Oregon, accessed November 15, 2025, https://pages.uoregon.edu/imamura/121/lecture-4/escape.html
︎
[10]: Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997
︎
[11]: “Multisensory integration — Neuroscience.” ScienceDirect. Accessed December 1, 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/multisensory-integration.
︎
[12]: Ware, Rudolph T.., Ware, Rudolph T.. The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. United States: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.; Nieber, Hanna. 2024. “Authority with Textual Materials – Power of the Written Qur’an.” Material Religion 20 (1): 51–72. doi:10.1080/17432200.2024.2303905.
︎︎
[13]: Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
︎
[14]: Groom, Amelia. Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins. United Kingdom: MIT Press, 2021.
︎
[15]: Rasheed, Kameelah Janan (2020)
︎
[16]: Gladman, Renee. Calamities. United States: Wave Books, 2020.
While texting with a friend and an interlocutor for another project, I noted that the composition field in Google Docs felt restrictive. I wanted to swell beyond the compositional field of the word processor, to exceed the page, so I went to the walls. Across three frantic messages, I shared In this meandering, she asked if I’d heard of Renee Gladman’s “commotional field” in Calamities (2016). I had not. To be honest, I felt betrayed, not from this friend, but of myself. I’d purchased Calamities years ago, and in working my way through a stack of books, I had not reached the shore of this text. I grabbed the book off my “need to read” shelf and began to read frantically. The commotion is riotous and disobedient. The compositional field refuses to settle. A compositional field speaks to the environment in which the writing occurs. Gladman’s articulation is almost an exponential expansion – that the compositional field has energy and affordances.