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• Presenter:
  • Kevin Darcy: ��ɫ��Ƶ PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology; 2023 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow
• Time: 10:40 AM to 11:30 AM

Description

“I can do everything everyone else can do, it just takes me longer and maybe I do it differently.” This is a common response to my question, “What do you wish people knew about your disability?” I theorize this sentiment as an urgent call for institutions to take seriously the lived realities of crip time. Crip time means that people with disabilities need more time to arrive somewhere and that it takes people with disabilities longer to complete activities because of ableist barriers and the ways that disability shapes all aspects of life (Kafer 2013). Yet, crip time is also agentive, a refusal to conform to heteronormative timelines of productivity, reproduction, and notions of adult independence (Wool 2021). This paper is based on 18 months of ethnographic research. I assess how people use subjective disability expertise (Hartblay 2020) to draw on crip time as a resource to work around ableist barriers in higher education. I argue that living on crip time is incommensurable with the timelines of productivity characteristic of neoliberal institutions. This research troubles these ableist frameworks by addressing the collisions between crip time and neoliberal timelines of productivity in higher education: student and workplace accommodations; the tenure track process; Universal Design for Learning (UDL approaches to course creation); and diversity and inclusion policies. In so doing, I draw attention to the ways that intersectionality should complicate analysis of these processes. My ethnographic data illustrates how crip time is inherent in quotidian activities, such as cooking and transportation, and the ways that crip time—as it emerges in professional academic spaces, such as in faculty expectations and completing course assignments—comes to matter in higher education.