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 colleagues: 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. Read more