Crip Time Research Articles

The Dedication

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic exploded and nursing homes rapidly became overwhelmed with disease, death, and despair. During this time, I learned Sylvia, an old woman with dementia I had befriended, was one of the many old and disabled people confined in nursing homes who did not survive. In this reflective and part personal, part scholarly essay, I leave evidence of and for Sylvia and the nearly 200,000 old and disabled people and care workers who contracted COVID-19 and died within the confines of neoliberal, profit-driven long-term care institutions. Disability justice activist Mia Mingus writes, "We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached." Leaving evidence is a political act, a form of resistance in an ableist word. And yet leaving evidence is particularly challenging in the context of dementia, care, confinement, and death—making it even more important, more urgent. Building on Ellen Samuels’ assertion, "Crip time is grief time," I consider how mourning Sylvia and countless other nursing home deaths, interwoven with my own experiences of distress, yet also solidified my need to survive, might leave evidence and keep working toward an abolitionist future—one in which old and disabled women like Sylvia, like my future self, might thrive.

The Educational Costs of Chrono-Curriculum and Academic Chrono-Politics on the Schooling of Disabled College Students in Kenya

A college education is vital because it exposes students to worldwide experiences fundamental for productive citizenship. However, it is elusive to most disabled citizens because of the clash of school time and disability and colleges’ obsession with efficiency. Guided by the historical, biological, and social construction of disability as a human flaw, this qualitative study contextualizes the findings within the frame of crip time, chrono-curriculum, and academic chrono-politics to reveal that disability is the basis of academic oppression and, therefore, the disempowerment of disabled college learners in Kenya. Education costs manifest in individual impairment/disability, lack of accommodations, inaccessible infrastructure, lost time, defensive unsupportive faculty and administrators, mythologies of disability, and poverty and insecurity. Since universities’ ableist chrono-curriculum and academic chrono-politics are educationally `costly to disabled students, the reformation of universities is needed to foster faculty disability awareness and commitment to disability rights and empowerment of disabled students.

Episodic disability in the neoliberal university: Stories from the Canadian context

AbstractThis article explores how episodic disability (ED) is created and intensified by, present within, and pushed out of the neoliberalized academy in Canada. ED is an umbrella term for a range of physical, mental, and neurological conditions characterized by fluctuation and unpredictability. Over two million working‐age Canadians are affected by ED, with women more likely to be impacted. To consider how ED interacts with post‐secondary education, we put feminist disability theories of embodied precarity, crip time, and disability justice into conversation with multimedia stories created by post‐secondary women workers with EDs, with story‐makers contextualizing and theorizing their creations, and revealing their complex embodied and embedded experiences. We chose these from stories generated in two research projects focused on transforming negative concepts of disability to serve as an “archivy” of embodied precarity that challenges ED's erasure in the academy. We think with the stories to analyze power and resistance in and on gendered and raced academic bodies along three overlapping themes: debility and vulnerability in the neoliberal university; fault‐lines of neoliberal time and embodied time; and EDs as produced in, and pushed out of, the neoliberal academy. Considering interrelations between ED and post‐secondary education under neoliberalism, we argue that feminist disability theory and justice praxis challenge debilitating and exclusionary expectations that harm people with EDs in and outside of the academy.

Enabling Crip Time With Digital Tools in Qualitative Inquiry

Grounded in the intersectional principles of disability justice, this article attends to the integration of digital tools in qualitative inquiry. With a focus on the unique temporal landscapes of Disabled people, I suggest ways that digital tools can foster a more equitable, accessible, and just inquiry experience. Using personal accounts from two digital tools, I highlight the relationship between crip time and digital tools at the sites of (a) video conferencing platforms, and (b) qualitative data analysis software. This is balanced alongside scholarly debates about access friction (i.e., accommodations are not universal or stagnant) and the digital divide.

Crip Time as Space

Crip Time as Space

Crip Time and Radical Care in/as Artful Politics

This article brings together critical disability scholarship and personal narrative, sharing the author’s pandemic story of disruption, caregiving, grief, burnout, cancer, and post-operative fatigue. It offers critical reflection on the limits of the neoliberal academy and possibilities for practicing liberatory politics within it, posing two central questions: What does it mean to crip time and centre care as an arts-based researcher? What might a commitment to honouring crip time based on radical care do for the author and their scholarship, and for others aspiring to conduct reworlding research? This analysis suggests that while committing to “slow scholarship” is a form of resistance to ableist capitalist and colonial pressures within the academy, slowness alone does not sufficiently crip research processes. Crip time, by contrast, involves multiply enfolded temporalities imposed upon (and reclaimed by) many researchers, particularly those living with disabilities and/or chronic illness. The article concludes that researchers can commit to recognizing crip time, valuing it, and caring for those living through it, including themselves, not only/necessarily by slowing down. Indeed, they can also carry out this work by actively imagining the crip futures they are striving to make along any/all trajectories and temporalities. This means simultaneously transforming academic institutions, refusing internalized pressures, reclaiming interdependence, and valuing all care work in whatever time it takes.

Decentering Colonialism and Ableism in Artistic Practices

This article introduces the work of five young disabled artists, creative workers, and scholars of color, who the authors invited to be on a panel titled Decentering Colonialism and Ableism in Artistic Practices at the 3rd International Conference on Disability Studies, Arts, and Education. In this article, we focus on three intersecting and interconnected themes that were discussed during the panel: crip time/wisdom, colonialism, and care. The artists work against colonial knowledge through lived experiences and desires that resist ableist, white, and normative structures. The power of artmaking materializes ideas through their bodies, writings, performances, and images through multiple media and technologies that elucidate the disabled bodymind conditions. The authors acknowledge how differently the pandemic allowed care to be offered for disabled, queer, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), particularly considering how black and brown people often provide the networks of care. We argue that the intersecting themes of crip time, colonialism, and care are significant for human ethical values and social justice.

An Introduction

An Introduction

Listening in Crip Time

Jordan Lord’s Shared Resources (2021) uses access features—namely, open captions and burned-in audio description—as a medium of crip creativity. A meditation on debilitation, debt, disability, and bankruptcy, Lord’s film asks what it means to listen from the perspective of the out-of-synch temporal experiences that disability scholars call “crip time.” To listen in crip time, Lord shows, is to rethink the temporality of access, turning it from an afterthought into a building block of documentary language. By reframing access as a collective responsibility, Shared Resources moves away from transactional and adversarial interpretations of documentary access as risk mitigation into a more powerful framework of accountability.

Scores

A prominent voice in the New Disability Arts movement, Carolyn Lazard is a multidisciplinary artist rethinking captioning and other access techniques as tools for composition. Reading several of Lazard’s works and collaborations, this essay theorizes the style of captions that functions as “scores”—open-ended scripts inviting audience members to activate the work, their bodies, and each other. As performance scores, these captions instruct or otherwise engage with readers/audiences, requesting their participation in the artmaking process. Lazard’s use of “scores” in works such as A Recipe for Disaster (2018), CRIP TIME (2018), and Notes from a Panorama (2021) carefully centers Black and brown, chronically ill, and other marginalized communities. As such, it uncovers the repetitive care labor of spectatorship as a form of survival.

Kesar doodh is my love-language <3

Kesar doodh1 is my love-language <3 Pinka Popsickle (bio) Keywords Pinka Popsickle, poetry, saffron Stranger, your hands hangingloose at your sides, don't // become you; they—of dark wood and dirty nails, belong on— pale gold thighs; lost in crippled fingers; and my Maggi (curled like curled fingers) in between pale gold thighs/ sighs/ size sighs/s∧Iz/ verb emit a long, deep audible breathsize/s∧Iz/ noun estimate or measure of a body's expansesays/seIz/ verb utter words Stranger, your lip hangingloose 'round your joint, doesn't // become you; it—of bruised plum tandoor meat, belongs to— mountain(s)peak moans, lost in craggy contours; and silver tongue (slurs like slurred speech) in between mountain-speak/ mountain's peaks/ mouth-in-speech [End Page 748] speak/spi:k/ verb say something to expresspeak/pi:k/ noun climax in Freytag's pyramidspeech/spi:t∫/ noun expression, usually censored in words Stranger, your dick hangingloose in your pants won't // become you; it—of piss-stench failed love belongs on— graffitti walls; lost in translations, slogans, nations; and narrations (twisted like twisted spines) in between pure gold lies/ guise/ gai-sguise/g∧Iz/ noun external form/ manner of presentation that conceals somethingguy/g∧I/ verb ridiculegai/g∧I/ गाय noun; transl. sacred cow Pinka Popsickle pinka popsickle/priyanka d`souza is an "artistorian" from Mumbai, India. In her academic and artistic practice, she works with crip time and protest in ecological reimaginings, Mughal miniatures, early modern natural history, and the concept of the ajai'b (wondrous/strange), particularly in imaginings of borderlands of nation-empires and as applied to anomalous/disabled bodies. She is a poet fellow at Zoeglossia '22, and has been an artist-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, London '21, and a Dara Shikoh Fellow '16. NOTE 1. transl. Saffron milk. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Pandemic pedagogy from both sides of the screen: A Teacher/Scholar/Parent's reflections on online time

Inspired by lessons hard won during a pandemic year spent simultaneously teaching university students online and parenting reluctant online learners at home, this article argues for a radical rethinking of course policies and practices that use normative interpretations and applications of time. Online composition pedagogy is built on paradoxical temporal models: the field's longstanding belief in process-oriented theories of writing demands a flexible, recursive understanding of time while the demonstrated benefits of online student engagement seem to require more rigidly temporal policies and methods, like regular, graded discussion boards. This article draws from Alison Kafer's concept of “crip time” and a year's worth of observation and practice to recommend that online teachers prioritize the narrative shape of their online classes. Such a reframing, I argue, may create not only more successful classes but more just and accessible ones.

Cripping Sex Work: Disabled Sex Workers and Racialized Disgender in the Online Sex Industry

This paper explores how disabled online sex workers experience “racialized disgendering” in social media spaces and content platforms and introduces a new framework for “cripping sex work.” After discussing how disabled sex workers experience crip time and their bodyminds while navigating labor demands in the online industry, this paper argues for a shift away from the neoliberal “empowerment” discourse in much research and activism related to sex work. And demonstrates how white and otherwise privileged sex workers benefit from and uphold systems of power that financially benefit them through sexual gentrification, while multiply marginalized sex workers experience cyberviolence and microaggressions at the hands of other sex workers. My analysis uncovers specific ways that racialized disgendering impacts sex workers with disabilities and argues for the importance of mutual aid and paying sex workers for their labor, culminating in a list of tangible action steps for privileged sex workers.

Splitting Selves: Crip Time and the Temporalities of Disability in Georgia Webber’s Dumb: Living Without a Voice

In the graphic narrative Dumb: Living Without a Voice (2018), Canadian cartoonist Georgia Webber explores her acquired physical disability after a severe vocal injury leaves her voiceless. As a talkative, social young woman working as a café server, Georgia’s life is interrupted when she is forced to adapt herself to a different way of navigating the world. Previous scholarly work has analyzed Dumb to articulate a connection between comics theory and disability rhetoric (Dolmage and Jacobs 2016) and explored its fruitful linkage between voice/voicelessness and identity (Venkatesan and Dastidar 2020). Building on the path opened by these scholars, the aim of this paper is to critically examine the representation of disability and its engagement with the concept of crip time in Dumb by drawing on the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies, crip theory, and comics theory. The first section of this paper will build on Alison Kafer’s formulation of the strange temporalities of disability (2013) to investigate the ways in which Webber constructs non-conventional layouts where she incorporates different formal elements to present Georgia’s lived experience of disability as a disruption of conventional temporalities. Special attention will be paid to the endless, frustrating routine of paperwork to apply for disability welfare that the protagonist faces when her condition renders her unable to work. In the second section, I will draw on the work of Ellen Samuels (2017) to examine how Webber negotiates her shifting identity by graphically splitting her embodied self on the page, composing a parallel timeline where she visualizes her pre-disabled and disabled selves. The power of the pictorial is also extended to Webber’s clever usage of color: while her cartoonish drawings appear in black and white, she employs red to draw Georgia’s inner voice and her pain. Finally, my last section will employ the conception of crip time developed by Petra Kuppers (2014) to explore Georgia’s reconnection with herself through her breathing exercises and her orientation towards artistic creativity. Overall, I will argue that Dumb does not present a narrative of recovery, as Georgia does not heal from her injury but engages instead with her disabled existence by turning inwards and depicting her voice (lessness).

Access Entanglements: Approaching Accessible Publishing Through Engagement and Dissensus

A conversation between artists Bojana Coklyat, Shannon Finnegan, Jessica Watkin, and scholar and curator Dr. Eliza Chandler which approaches access and publishing from the vantage of centring disability and its multi-sensorial ways of knowing, engaging with concepts of care, crip time, interdependence and collaboration, the limitations of access as “inclusion,” disability as creatively generative, and access as a distinct methodology for artmaking.

Like clockwork? (Re)imagining rhythms and routines when living with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Temporal trajectories of health, illness and disability-from biographical change to micro-embodied practices within social time-are important strands within medical sociology and disability studies. Drawing upon a UK-based qualitative study using diaries and follow-up interviews to explore everyday life with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), this article explores routines when living with the condition. It focuses specifically on accounts of routines being anticipated, slowed down and stretched out to accommodate and/or care for bodies, with personal and social rhythms weaved in, out and with each other. Such reflections are told through participants' accounts of knowing routines and rhythms, stretching out and pacing morning routines to care for the body and how everyday practices are reimagined as the body and the social meet. Drawing upon the concept of 'Crip Time' where the social bends to meet with the body, this article seeks to illuminate important intersections between medical sociology and disability studies through accounts of living with IBS. This article demonstrates the entanglement of structural, disabling temporal rhythms and embodied temporalities, through an acknowledgement of routines reimagined. It offers a contribution to both medical sociology and disability studies in reimagining social lives with embodied temporalities in mind.

Challenging normalcy through stardom: childhood celebrity, disability, and Patty Duke’s Helen Keller

ABSTRACT What is it about girl stars, from Shirley Temple to Jodie Foster, that intensely and ambivalently capture the cultural imagination? I argue that child stars, often described as transitioning into adulthood too quickly or staying too long in childhood, challenge damaging social norms of bodily and behavioural development in ways that are sympathetic to disability experience. I use disability studies’ theory of ‘crip time’ and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of the political potential of children ‘growing sideways’ alongside the case study of Patty Duke to demonstrate this productive subversiveness. Duke’s star persona, centred on her portrayal of the young deaf, blind, and uncommunicative Helen Keller in William Gibson’s Broadway play and Arthur Penn’s subsequent film, reveals the parallel developmental non-normativity of disability and child stardom.Through contradictory primary and paratextual evidence surrounding The Miracle Worker and Duke’s stardom, the application of crip time to notions of childhood celebrity, and a contextual understanding of public discourse surrounding childhood during the 1960s, I find that Duke and her characterisation of Keller embody a rejection of conventional understandings of ‘growing up’. Duke’s ambivalent childhood celebrity fractures the constructed ideal of normal development, revealing possibilities for valuable experience beyond the pressures of ableist notions of linear growth.

Aging, Crip Time, and Dependency Care in Joyce Farmer’s &lt;i&gt;Special Exits&lt;/i&gt;

This essay explores how Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits resists the prevailing decline-burden discourse concerning aging-into-disability and dependency care by imagining alternative perceptions of aging-into-disability temporal and caregiving constructs that are not centered on productivity, independence, and progress. Drawing on Alison Kafer’s “crip time” and Eva Kittay’s “dependency care” concepts, the essay examines a fundamental reorientation that resists ableist-dominated descriptions of normative timelines, and shows how Farmer uses narrative pacing in Special Exits to match the ways that its older adult characters respond to physical and mental challenges that require flexibility and adjustment. The author also shows how aging-into-disability can be reimagined through a crip time lens that emphasizes new forms of living with and in relationship to time instead of only considering deficits and losses. The second part discusses how crip time and care time intersect, and how caregiving takes on a transformative meaning for the story’s characters when dependency is viewed as facilitating interdependence and connection, thus transforming care-giving into care-gifting. Farmer uses this intersection along with an aging-disability nexus lens to address the ongoing need for counternarratives to challenge normative perceptions of aging and disability, and to promote a future in which individuals with age-associated disabilities can flourish by accepting and acting in accordance with their own time requirements.

Museum Education for Disability Justice and Liberatory Access

ABSTRACT This article engages crip theory and concepts from Critical Disability Studies to frame museum education through critical access and disability justice to center disabled, Mad, and neurodiverse audiences in public practice. The authors introduce and define key concepts and ask questions to cultivate liberatory access for museum education. Theoretical concepts include (1) critical access and “leadership of those most impacted,” (2) crip time and flexibility, and (3) curatorial care and collective responsibility. By engaging the work of crip knower-makers, we elucidate the ways in which these three areas can inform a politics of relation and pedagogical practices. In essence, we propose liberatory access and a pedagogy in solidarity with the disability justice movement, as a reorientation through which disabled people are not invited to participate in an able-bodied, inaccessible space, but where we all venture toward a world of solidarity to inhabit alongside one another.

Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work

Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work