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Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life
In Crip Spacetime , Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than 300 interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual accommodations—the primary ways universities address accessibility—actually impede access rather than enhancing it. She argues that the pains and injustices encountered by academia’s disabled workers result in them living and working in different realities than nondisabled a unique experience of space, time, and being that Price theorizes as “crip spacetime.” She explores how disability factors into the exclusionary practices found in universities, with multiply minoritized academics facing the greatest harms. Highlighting the knowledge that disabled academics already possess about how to achieve sustainable forms of access, Price boldly calls for the university to move away from individualized models of accommodation and toward a new system of collective accountability and care.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published April 19, 2024
19 people are currently reading
280 people want to read
About the author
Margaret Price
31 books11 followersMargaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College and the author of Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (University of Michigan Press, 2011)."
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 4, 2024
A strong, necessary, and well-researched critique of institutional attempts at “access” that view disability as an individual problem rather than a shared relationship. I’ve been a fan of Price’s work for some time (and will have the honor of being in conversation with her at this year’s NWSA conference) and am particularly excited to further explore how opacity and obscurity can be weaponized against disabled people by those who control accommodations.
-1 star for the conclusion, which I found quite anemic and disappointing compared to the robust discussion in the preceding chapters.
-1 star for the conclusion, which I found quite anemic and disappointing compared to the robust discussion in the preceding chapters.
Currently reading
March 14, 2025starting to think disability studies is just a space for overeducated white scholars to appropriate the work of black activists then rewrite it in the most inaccessible way possible so they can dominate the publishing field
February 1, 2025
I appreciate this but the theory is so dense it is basically inaccessible to most people (chapter one, especially). I had to work for it but I also was already familiar with most of the theorists/theories cited. For people without that background, even highly educated academics in other fields, this will probably be a challenge.
Also I knew it was going to be primarily about criptime in academic life from the title, but I didn't expect it to be so fully focused on people who teach credit bearing courses. It doesn't acknowledge how much autonomy faculty have compared to academics doing other type of work, which to me seems to be an oversight.
Plus the conclusion could have really benefited from engaging with some of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's work on liberation.
Also I knew it was going to be primarily about criptime in academic life from the title, but I didn't expect it to be so fully focused on people who teach credit bearing courses. It doesn't acknowledge how much autonomy faculty have compared to academics doing other type of work, which to me seems to be an oversight.
Plus the conclusion could have really benefited from engaging with some of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's work on liberation.
September 21, 2025
Collective accountability is the only way forward (p. 102).
Disabled people are both hypervisible and invisible, our experiences and needs garishly obvious yet somehow obscure at the same time. (p. 2)
Access as envisioned and practiced in the contemporary university actually worsens inequity rather than mitigates it. In other words, even when policy makers, scholars, and everyone else involved in the academic enterprise make sincere efforts to “include” disabled people, the disparities between disabled and nondisabled life only get more pronounced—not less. (p. 5)
“Making something accessible doesn’t mean making it comfortable.“ – Justice A. Fowler, 2017 (p. 30)
Surveillance is part of the reason the accommodations system is harmful, even when it’s meant to do good. The system is predicated on the assumptions that access should be measurable and distributed by an authority. (p. 55)
The system of accommodation assumes that access can be quantified and divided among people. In other words, it begins from the assumption that access itself must be a scarce resource. (p. 59)
“Although accommodations are often referred to as measures that 'level the playing field,' that metaphor produces a dangerous misrepresentation” because navigating the accommodations process is arduous, typically must be repeated over and over again, and extracts time, money, effort, and emotional cost. Also, the full weight and difficult of navigating this process is typically invisible to people who don’t have to go through it (p. 100).
“Just because you get [an accommodation] doesn’t mean it won’t be held against you.” (p. 105)
In practice, accommodations often must be negotiated as if they were a special privilege (p. 123).
Access is…
Access in its full potential is an unfolding process. (p. 30)
Access is an emerging and context-dependent phenomenon, governed in part by structural forces. (p. 31)
Ultimately, access cannot be governed by state control, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it cannot be the responsibility only of whoever “owns” the building, or the equipment, or the department, or the university itself. Unless we look to different ways of understanding access in space, we will continue to replicate an accommodation model that attempts to fix problems in the short term but harms in the long term—physically, emotionally, and epistemically. (p. 72)
Accommodations, as currently practiced in academic workplaces, are predictive moves attached to an individual and designed to make that individual’s disability disappear. Access, by contrast, is simply what you need in a particular situation as it becomes. (p. 102)
Accommodation generally doesn’t increase access. It impedes it. All the problems with accommodation–the inconvenience, the emotional burden, the money, the time, are not “the cost of doing business.” Rather, they are the point. The system, as the saying goes, is working as intended. It’s designed to fail–that is, it’s designed to fail us, the employees. (p. 133).
Hampered by:
* Bureaucratic delays, see pp. 82-83, even when an accommodation is acutely needed; this is sometimes done intentionally to save the university money (p. 85)
* The accommodation provided by the university may take a long time to utilize
* Lack of records of what accommodations have historically been provided (when an employee leaves, there is no record left behind)
* Requiring a disabled person to repeat their request many times, making them seem unreasonable (p. 91)
* The university’s belief that access and accommodations will cost more than they save/produce (pp. 110-111).
* It’s emotionally difficult (p. 113).
On Diagnosis
Diagnosis is not an inevitable fact, but an operation of power (p. 9) – (citing Allyson Day, 2021, 5)
On Disclosure
Strategies of disclosure should be understood as agentive rhetorics of risk management (p. 29) – (citing Tara Wood, 2017, 88)
The more difficult a disability is to explain, the more hostility it seems to invite (p. 118).
Disabled people are both hypervisible and invisible, our experiences and needs garishly obvious yet somehow obscure at the same time. (p. 2)
Access as envisioned and practiced in the contemporary university actually worsens inequity rather than mitigates it. In other words, even when policy makers, scholars, and everyone else involved in the academic enterprise make sincere efforts to “include” disabled people, the disparities between disabled and nondisabled life only get more pronounced—not less. (p. 5)
“Making something accessible doesn’t mean making it comfortable.“ – Justice A. Fowler, 2017 (p. 30)
Surveillance is part of the reason the accommodations system is harmful, even when it’s meant to do good. The system is predicated on the assumptions that access should be measurable and distributed by an authority. (p. 55)
The system of accommodation assumes that access can be quantified and divided among people. In other words, it begins from the assumption that access itself must be a scarce resource. (p. 59)
“Although accommodations are often referred to as measures that 'level the playing field,' that metaphor produces a dangerous misrepresentation” because navigating the accommodations process is arduous, typically must be repeated over and over again, and extracts time, money, effort, and emotional cost. Also, the full weight and difficult of navigating this process is typically invisible to people who don’t have to go through it (p. 100).
“Just because you get [an accommodation] doesn’t mean it won’t be held against you.” (p. 105)
In practice, accommodations often must be negotiated as if they were a special privilege (p. 123).
Access is…
Access in its full potential is an unfolding process. (p. 30)
Access is an emerging and context-dependent phenomenon, governed in part by structural forces. (p. 31)
Ultimately, access cannot be governed by state control, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it cannot be the responsibility only of whoever “owns” the building, or the equipment, or the department, or the university itself. Unless we look to different ways of understanding access in space, we will continue to replicate an accommodation model that attempts to fix problems in the short term but harms in the long term—physically, emotionally, and epistemically. (p. 72)
Accommodations, as currently practiced in academic workplaces, are predictive moves attached to an individual and designed to make that individual’s disability disappear. Access, by contrast, is simply what you need in a particular situation as it becomes. (p. 102)
Accommodation generally doesn’t increase access. It impedes it. All the problems with accommodation–the inconvenience, the emotional burden, the money, the time, are not “the cost of doing business.” Rather, they are the point. The system, as the saying goes, is working as intended. It’s designed to fail–that is, it’s designed to fail us, the employees. (p. 133).
Hampered by:
* Bureaucratic delays, see pp. 82-83, even when an accommodation is acutely needed; this is sometimes done intentionally to save the university money (p. 85)
* The accommodation provided by the university may take a long time to utilize
* Lack of records of what accommodations have historically been provided (when an employee leaves, there is no record left behind)
* Requiring a disabled person to repeat their request many times, making them seem unreasonable (p. 91)
* The university’s belief that access and accommodations will cost more than they save/produce (pp. 110-111).
* It’s emotionally difficult (p. 113).
On Diagnosis
Diagnosis is not an inevitable fact, but an operation of power (p. 9) – (citing Allyson Day, 2021, 5)
On Disclosure
Strategies of disclosure should be understood as agentive rhetorics of risk management (p. 29) – (citing Tara Wood, 2017, 88)
The more difficult a disability is to explain, the more hostility it seems to invite (p. 118).
May 11, 2024
Highly, highly recommend this book. As someone who struggled this semester (Spring '24) with unexpected chronic pain (ongoing dental work resulting in three cavities filled, two root canals, and two crowns, all in the space of five months), on top of my own preexisting mental gremlins, which themselves are challenging to manage, Crip Spacetime helped me articulate what, exactly, made my work in higher education difficult this year and what I wanted in the semesters and years to come. I also increasingly do research in disability studies within rhetoric and composition and the concepts advanced here are helpful to my scholarship and teaching.
Price is also super with methodological work, articulating her analytical choices in ways that are useful for me, as a beginning researcher; having access to her work as a doctoral student would, I think, have helped me better conceptualize what qualitative, interview-based research turns out looking like and how one talks about it in print.
Finally, Price writes in a very accessible style; even if you're not a rhet-comp scholar or a disability studies scholar or any kind of scholar at all, frankly, if you're just interested in the topic –– you will be able to follow her points.
If you're at all interested in questions of access, disability rights, or disability/neurodiversity inclusion, this is a fantastic book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Price is also super with methodological work, articulating her analytical choices in ways that are useful for me, as a beginning researcher; having access to her work as a doctoral student would, I think, have helped me better conceptualize what qualitative, interview-based research turns out looking like and how one talks about it in print.
Finally, Price writes in a very accessible style; even if you're not a rhet-comp scholar or a disability studies scholar or any kind of scholar at all, frankly, if you're just interested in the topic –– you will be able to follow her points.
If you're at all interested in questions of access, disability rights, or disability/neurodiversity inclusion, this is a fantastic book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
September 21, 2024
3.8 rounded up. Useful to read for my research. Not really certain about the conclusion. It made sense but will be difficult to achieve. I did but the main argument but not sure that it needed to be as complex as it sounds.
January 22, 2025
So so so so so good. The key concepts of Access Fatigue, Entanglement, Accommodations Loop, Collective Accountability, Access Priming , Gathering. I learned and remembered so much from this book. It is a guide to the harms and how to resist and counteract some of the harms of academia
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews