Vyshali’s work is interdisciplinary, multimodal, transgenre, and open access, emphasizing the culturally specific nature of chronic pain and fatigue while using anomalously embodied composition to enact it. Her writing, teaching, and service activities revolve around disability studies, decoloniality, affect theory, postmodernism, visual discourse, and transgressive digital subcultures. Methodologically, she gravitates to fictocritical autoethnography, digital “repairing play” (Trammell, 2023), code-meshed transgenre writing, and multimodal, lyric forms to reconceptualize composition and work toward accessible, socially just futurities.

She is particularly interested in how Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled embodiment, genocide-related intergenerational trauma, and “survival media” (Perera, 2016)⁠⁠ composition—including a culturally specific poetics of chronic pain⁠—converge and conflict with Eurocentric rhetorical traditions and ocularnormativity, biomedical technologies and curative logic, and academic habitus and style, constructing and mediating BIPOC disabled bodyminds in the process.

By extension, a central conceit of her writing, teaching, and praxis is that institutions are inherently self-serving, and any and all conversations about reimagining academia, the literary industry, or the biomedical complex must start from a place of political refusal and the desire to innovate outside of the colonial wound that keeps these systems sated.