Aimée Hope Morrison conducts research on social media, visual and digital rhetoric, digital humanities, disability studies, and life writing. She also co-hosts a very popular podcast, All the Things ADHD, and is actively working to bridge scholarly and popular knowledge about neurodiversity.

This talk considers how new media platforms, tools, and cultures might be leading us further and further away from our bodies and into our minds, to the detriment of each. The meme “Touch Grass,” an offhanded insult derived from therapy-speak lobbed at those we deem as having lost touch with reality from being extremely online, begins to capture a groundswell of discontent with the increasing virtuality of our everyday lives. By more closely delineating the links between embodied action and cognitive capacity, between producing and creating, we will consider how we might reorient our use of technology to support fully embodied human intelligence and ability, to allow us to “touch grass” more often and with less worry.