Accessing higher education is hard enough for disabled students, who are faced with under-resourced offices of disability services, dismissive faculty, and unforeseen breakdowns of physical accessibility. But for those who make their way through the gauntlets of graduate school and the job market and reach “the other side” as faculty and staff, there can be ruder awakenings in store. Institutional supports for students with disabilities may leave much to be desired, and most institutions have yet to recognize the reality that disabled faculty and staff exist at all.
Advocating for access as a faculty or staff member can be a black box of negotiation and entreaty, volleying among human resources, academic departments, university leadership, and (if we’re lucky) union reps, with no clear locus of institutional responsibility. We might find ourselves in the unsavory position of asking our department chairs to allocate significant portions of their meager budgets to ensure we can physically work in our offices, or disclosing our personal health information to administrators who oversee promotion and tenure. Even after all that, we learn to expect the reply, “You need to talk to someone else.”
Margaret Price’s Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life, which explores the experiences of disabled faculty in higher education, has been a long time coming. Written over the course of 12 years, spanning dozens of interviews with faculty with a range of disabilities at all stages of their careers, Price’s second monograph is not only the highly anticipated follow-up to her 2011 rhetorical study Mad at School but also a monumental experiment in community-based research whose interdependent methodology welcomes disabled participants and interviewers. A work of social science and theory undertaken by a scholar of rhetoric, the book both documents the harrowing toll that workplace accommodations processes can take on faculty members—sometimes driving them out of academia entirely—and devotes careful attention to the ethical dimensions and inherent risks of making these stories public. Recently, Crip Spacetime was awarded the Alison Piepmeier Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association and received an honorable mention for the Research Impact Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Crip Spacetime offers a paradigm-shifting theory that unites these narratives: The accommodations-based model of accessibility in higher education is not just insufficient, as disability communities have long argued, but also directly harmful despite its good intentions. Price weaves deeply moving personal stories with questions about the very nature and purpose of higher education, revealing profound tensions between the modern university and the well-being of its workforce while maintaining the possibility of imagining academia otherwise.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Price to discuss her new book and her own story of navigating higher education as a disabled academic. From the promises and perils of best practices to the meme-ification of “normalizing” everything under the sun, the questions generated by Crip Spacetime show how we might begin to cut through the impasses and misdirections that attend institutional efforts at inclusion.
Liz Bowen (LB): I’m going to start with a fundamental question about the concept at the heart of this fabulous book, which is “crip spacetime.” This was really resonant for me personally: that the material conditions of moving through the world as someone who is disabled, whether or not we identify that way, structures our sense of reality, in a way that is often obscure to those who are not moving through the world with those same sets of conditions.
How did you come up with this concept? How does it manifest in the space of higher education?
Margaret Price (MP): The word you just used, “obscure,” is a big part of it for me. Maybe even the biggest part.
I first heard a fellow scholar and disabled person use the term “obscure” to describe his experience of disability many years ago at a conference. I thought, Yes, that is it. It is not hidden, it is not invisible, it is obscure. The experience of disability has this curious hard-to-see quality, even while also being weirdly out in the open, garishly apparent.
An example of this is one of the interview participants, whose pseudonym is Miyoko. She was working to get accommodations in place at her job, and since she knew that she was going to need them, she started the process well ahead of time, more than six months ahead of time. The book has the whole story, but basically it just devolved into an endless correspondence argument with her school’s administration in which every letter they sent her was by certified mail. They refused to do e-mail. They refused to phone or meet in person, so it was moving at this glacial, very legalized pace. And every time, Miyoko had to explain what was happening to a new administrator or a new person. And that just completely befuddled me.
So every time Miyoko had to talk to a new person about this, she had to go all the way back to the beginning and explain what had been happening. And sometimes she had to explain things that appeared incredibly simple. At one point she had asked for a redistribution of her courses. Instead of teaching three in the fall and three in the spring, she wanted to teach two spring, two fall, and then two over the summer. The person she was corresponding with at the time kept calling it a course reduction, and she said in her interview with me, “I actually drew a little table to explain that two plus two plus two is the same as three plus three.”
So here is one of the things that happens in what I’m calling crip spacetime. And in it, you start to feel literally insane. Think about Miyoko: Okay, I’m talking to a grown college administrator who couldn’t do this math problem. Or: I am now talking to my fifth person over the course of six months who is starting the conversation by saying, “Well, why don’t you tell me what you need,” or “So, what has been going on?” And you’ve already told this story in agonizing detail, multiple times to multiple people who have power over you. Almost everybody you are talking to is probably your boss in some way, shape, or form.
Now, many people struggle in higher education in many ways. The piece that to me makes it crip spacetime is that only the person experiencing it has a view of all the parts of it. Only Miyoko knew that this had been going on for months. Only she knew that she had had this conversation three, five, eight, ten times. Only one other person knew that she had been asked to explain that three plus three was the same as two plus two plus two.
In crip spacetime, one of the aspects of the obscurity is that typically other people literally don’t know what you are going through. They are not in a position to know what you are going through. So then usually, according to the interview participants, the person in crip spacetime gets to a point where they have an extreme reaction. They might burst into tears. They might start yelling in a professional context. In Miyoko’s case, she was already tenured, yet she quit. That is a really unusual thing for a tenured academic to do, just walk away from a tenured job, saying, “It is not worth it.” And one of the things that awakened me to the fact of crip spacetime is that the other people in this situation are genuinely baffled: “Oh my god, why are you crying?” “What happened?” “Why are you so upset?” “Why would you quit your secure job?” Because it is obscure what has been happening.
Now, people who have minoritized experiences vis-à-vis institutions will recognize this. It is not just about literally disabled people. People of color will recognize this dynamic. Probably most women will recognize this dynamic. So one reason I called it crip spacetime and not disabled spacetime is it is not so much about disability, it is about this radical misfit with normative experience.
LB: That is really important. And what you are saying is also making me think about how the dynamics of obscuring here are related to—but not completely coincident with—the ways that many outsider, minoritized statuses can be fluctuating and varied in their legibility.
Take the idea of “invisible disability,” a concept that we could probably talk about for an hour. Even within that category, there are so many ways that, due to varied embodiments, varied environmental contexts, disability can become more or less visible or legible over time. How does that play into this idea of crip spacetime?
I also would invite you, if you are willing, to talk about your own experience as somebody who is situated among multiple categories of disability, which may be more or less apparent to others in various contexts.
Access priming is a very simple process that can prevent some of these scenarios: it is suggesting what you might do for another person.
MP: In my first book, Mad at School, I talk a little bit about the notion of invisible disability; at the time, my thinking was not very far along, but I knew I didn’t like that term. It didn’t work for me. It didn’t work for my experience of disability.
And it also didn’t work for my experience of queerness. I’m a genderqueer person who is consistently read as a woman, and especially the older I get, the more consistently people just assume that I’m a cis woman, I’m a straight woman, and I’m non-disabled. So these things have often been pretty front and center for me
In Mad at School, I tried out the term “apparitional” for disability: It appears and disappears, and of course that concept has a lot in common with concepts like queer passing. Which, as any queer knows, is not something you are quite doing on purpose, and sometimes it is a way of being safer and sometimes it can really put you in danger. So it’s not simple at all. And similarly of course with racial passing, because the term passing was coined in terms of racial dynamics. So I was trying out the word apparitional and other ideas about visibility and invisibility.
But in the period of time when I was writing Crip Spacetime, I was getting more and more and more disabled. My disabilities include cognitive disabilities, which probably began with my autoimmune disease. I was diagnosed with my first autoimmune disease when I was 15. When I was younger, I had miscellaneous joint pain and brittle bones. Now that I’m 54, those are really serious problems with basically every step I take. And I get sick really easily, and it is scary. It is a big deal. I might need to be hospitalized. I might get yet another case of pneumonia. And I notice a couple of things about all these experiences of disability.
One thing is that it is very hard to explain how serious this is to other people. And that has gotten much more common, of course, with the advent of COVID. Many people now are familiar with the experience of trying to say to someone else, “You really can’t even give me a cold. It is going to be terrible.” Or, “I really don’t think you understand how tired I am. I don’t think you understand the difference between fatigue and just being tired at the end of the day.” So it is very hard sometimes to explain why I can’t do something because I’m walking around, I look fine, and I appear to be cogent. As a colleague once said to me, I appear to be “healthy as a horse.” I didn’t love that. So that is one thing that really comes to the fore about visibility and my own disability experience.
The other thing is that sometimes I am so much more visible than I want to be. If I’m having a panic attack, for example. That is extremely noticeable to the people around me, but it typically doesn’t read as a panic attack. It typically reads as I’m acting like an asshole: I have suddenly gotten very angry or I suddenly can’t talk or everyone is trying to get somewhere but I sat down. And I have this everyday sense of: God, I just can’t explain this; this is so embarrassing; it is so frustrating; and at the same time, I sure wish people would understand how hard I’m struggling. It was that personal experience in large part that got me interested in what it means for disability to appear to others in a communicative relation, and that made the interview process for Crip Spacetime so exciting. Many people have many different experiences from mine, and not all of us had disabilities that are hard to notice, but I just felt I was coming into a fellowship.
LB: One of the major arguments of this book is the idea that the accommodations-based model—which governs institutional accessibility—is not just broken but fundamentally also harmful. That’s the model that most people in higher education are familiar with, in which disabled people have to identify themselves to the institution and request specific accommodations that will, in theory, enable them to fully participate in their education or their workplace. And that to me was what was so exciting about this project. After all, there have been critiques of accommodations in disability studies for quite some time, but usually on a different basis: It’s a very individualistic model and it doesn’t go far enough. But your critique is not just that it doesn’t go far enough but that it actually harms people.
So, what is the distinction between accommodations and access? How does that conflict arise, and how does it produce harm?
MP: One way to think about why the notion of an individual accommodation is fundamentally flawed is to imagine you have built a car and it has square wheels. You can improve those wheels as much as you want, use better materials, make them bigger, smaller, thicker, skinnier. Still, if they are square, the car is not going to go, period.
That’s how individual accommodations must be thought of, as fundamentally flawed, as needing a paradigmatic shift. That, like the rest of the project, was called to my attention very slowly. So I noticed pretty early on, some people in academia are accommodatable and some people are un-accommodatable. And for a number of years I was using this distinction, accommodatable, un-accommodatable. I would try to give examples of somebody who was accommodatable, such as: They might need a ramp instead of stairs. And then I would try to give an example of someone who was un-accommodatable: They might have seizures at unpredictable intervals. But the more I developed that example, or that idea, the more I realized it wasn’t working. It was creating a clean division where there is not a clean division, and it was leaving out material and political considerations. It is not fair to say, “All they need is a ramp,” or “All they need is an interpreter.” Because we are embedded in a world that makes that just as difficult as a less well-known accommodation much of the time.
In realizing I needed a different metric for this, I arrived at predictability. This came about because I realized I need to stop looking at the bodies of people and look at the system itself: the system of accommodations.
One of the bedrock things about the accommodation model is you have to be able to predict what you are going to need. You have to be able to say what you are going to need and when. So, “I will need extended time on this exam next week.” Or “I will need the following classroom next semester.” Accommodation does not work without predictability.
This, in many ways, was building on the notion of the retrofit, which my friends and colleagues Jay Dolmage and M. Remi Yergeau have written about really beautifully. An accommodation is by nature a retrofit, and I realized an accommodation is also by nature a prediction. And that prediction can’t be made unless all kinds of things are in place, including material supports, a particular structure or space to move through, and the level of privilege to be able to make that prediction. That is what made me realize this system is fundamentally flawed, because predictability is not always possible. And the people who do survive in academe, like me, may have pretty weird or obscure disabilities, but we have learned to work with predictability enough that we can continue to survive as students or as employees. It is a fronting, or as Tobin Siebers might say, a masquerade of predictability.
So that is accommodation. It requires being able to predict, and it requires being able to function within a system that makes predictability non-negotiable.
Access, by contrast, is a more responsive concept. One is constantly checking in, taking account of things, relations, who is around, what objects are around, what space I am in, how much time we have. So access as a relational idea begins to look a lot more like the concept of disability justice, and one of the fundamental principles of disability justice is “Unless we can all go, no one goes.” There is a fundamental commitment to solidarity and moving together.
Now the problem in an institution like academia, which is distinctly not a disability justice space, is that is almost impossible to enact this relational access at scale.
LB: One of the things that really rang true for me was the way you described the objective of the accommodations model being to get rid of the disability. It is a reductive perversion of the social model, this idea that you just provide a one-time or singular thing and then the disability is accommodated and it is gone, and we don’t have to think about it.
Whereas, for those of us who live within crip spacetime, it is very clear that being accommodated eliminates neither the embodied conditions that we navigate the world with nor many of the environmental conditions that we navigate through. As opposed to accommodation, the notion of access responds to the reality that you are always coming into relation with the environment, with the other people in that environment, and needs will shift as that happens.
I work within a university of medical education. In medical schools, all the institutional constraints that you identify in this book are operative, and they can be intensified by the empirically minded frameworks that guide these institutions. When presented with problems of equity or access, institutions often respond, “Okay, there is a problem, so we want to know how to fix it. We want the guidance, the best practices that have been thoroughly tested and validated. If this thing is broken, what do we do instead?”
Your book offers a critique of this idea that there are best practices to guarantee access, and it suggests that we need to think beyond that idea with a more relational framework. At the same time, the book recognizes that there are times when we might strategically refer to best practices or checklists in order to get what we need. How can we hold all of that together and still try to think beyond the checklist?
MP: My job is as a rhetoric and disability studies professor. But I’m really more of a philosopher at heart, and one of the things I’m most interested in is: When do we need to be reductive and when do we need to be expansive? When do we need to be more concrete, and when do we need to say, “It depends”?
It has become fairly popular in some disability communities to be against checklists. I have been writing about checklists for many years, for all the reasons that they are commonly critiqued. They tend to imply that there is a way to finish being antiracist or anti-ableist, or antisexist. They are by nature reductive.
However, at one point in the book, I refer to this idea of strategic essentialism—which is from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—and that is a really important part of moving in community as well. There is no such thing as not reducing and essentializing all the time throughout our day. So, as often as possible in Crip Spacetime, I’m trying to point to ways that we can make good use of tools like checklists, recommendations, knowledges, best practices, while also holding on to ambiguity and the need to be more open, more willing to say, “It depends,” or “You have to build relations before you can really know that.”
I will give one example from the book, which I call access priming. This is built on my experience of having people grab things away from me.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m almost always taken for a woman, and I’m often taken as not a very strong person. Interestingly, although I’m very disabled, I’m actually very strong. I do physical therapy all the time. Every week. So it is not hard for me to do something like lift my suitcase over my head, and it’s usually not hard for me to carry a bunch of two-by-fours out of a store. And I have been noticing for many years that people—honestly, usually white men—will grab objects away from me when I’m trying to do something with them. I’m putting a two-by-four in my car or a suitcase in the overhead rack, and a well-meaning person will grab it.
This is a big deal for me, not only because I find it irritating personally but also because it is physically dangerous. It would be easy to pull my shoulder out of joint or break my arm. People don’t know that. There are many other examples of obscure disabilities that are similar. A person who uses a wheelchair who is rolling through a doorway and opening the door probably doesn’t want someone to grab it unannounced.
Access priming is a very simple process that can prevent some of these scenarios: It is suggesting what you might do for another person. Take the example of someone rolling toward the door and opening it themselves: The act of access priming would be saying, “Do you want me to get the door for you?” And then—this is a key part—paying attention to the response.
It is quite common, especially in the US, for people to offer to do something while doing it at the same time. That’s not helpful, usually. So access priming might look like: “Can I get the door for you?” And then if the person says, “No, I got it,” then just accept that. Move on. Access priming in a meeting, regardless of whether anyone has identified a specific disability, might take the form of saying, “Let’s have a talk about the lights. Do we want the lights on or off? Are there pros and cons people want to check in about?”
The point of access priming is, as the name suggests, priming the space for conversations about access. It signals that you are willing to discuss access, but the other really important piece, besides being willing to listen to the answer, is that it suggests you have something specific in mind. So access priming is also an active rebuttal to the common phrase, “Let me know if I can help,” or “Just let me know if there is anything I can do.” Again, those are very well-meant statements, but they are so vague it is often quite hard to take people up on them. So access priming is suggesting something specific you might do, listening to the answer, and acting on that answer. And then just doing that repeatedly.
LB: That is so concrete.
MP: I love concreteness. I’m very into knowing what to do, so I really attend to that, as well as the more abstract, theoretical part.
LB: I have a question about the tendency to advocate for things like access and inclusion on the basis of the value that disabled faculty and staff bring to the institution. In my context, which is medical students, we say: “Well, having disabled doctors is going to enable us to provide better patient care.” And we draw on evidence that doctors with lived experience of disability and illness tend to have understanding, empathy, and connection with patients that other doctors might not immediately possess. But this is a very instrumentalizing way of talking about what we are doing. And it doesn’t capture the whole, complex picture of what disabled people bring to the spaces in which we move and contribute.
I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that critique and where you think it is useful and where you think it is not.
MP: It is really interesting to me to dig to the bottom of a claim like that. So the argument is that disabled people are a valuable resource pool, and this is why we need more disabled people in the workforce. If you dig into that claim, one of the fundamental assumptions is that individual people have individual units of value and that value is additive. If we have more smart people or more people who can work productively in the workforce, then we have a workforce that is now plus 10 or plus 15. And that in and of itself is not inherently evil. But we also should be able to say, “Is that how I want to see people? How I want to see work?”
So the value-add argument is premised on the assumption that capitalism is the system we are working within. People’s worth is equivalent to their productivity in a capitalist labor force. And once we recognize that we’re thinking about it that way, we can take a breath and ask, “Are those the metrics we are trying for?”
A lot of people who make value-add or interest convergence arguments haven’t thought about that. The interest convergence argument—and here I’m quoting again my friend Jay Dolmage—is saying, well, not everybody can use stairs, but everybody can use a ramp, so installing a ramp will be better for everybody. That is a really common argument for universal design. And Jay points out that the “better for everybody” argument implies that if it isn’t better for everybody, it’s worthless. Now, the example you gave goes beyond the idea of value-add or interest convergence, because the idea that a disabled doctor might bring a different kind of empathy to their work does seem to point to something bigger than just being quantifiably better at the job. It might be pointing to the idea that empathy is an important part of being a care worker, and it’s also a part that can’t easily be quantified. So in some cases, interest convergence is an overly simple matter of saying, “This is a win-win!” But the example you’re sharing, about the importance of drawing on disabled people’s lived experience and wisdom, gets at other dimensions too.
So, I might use arguments of interest convergence or people as value-add if I’m trying to get folks on board to a project, especially a project from which I can see the material benefit immediately. If it is a grant that can be redistributed to communities that lack those resources, absolutely.
But when I have the opportunity to cause people to pause and think, Oh, how often am I equating people’s value with their productivity? I want to also be able to do that. It is not always possible, but one of my goals, when speaking to audiences who are not yet thinking about disability in a complex or nuanced way, is to hope that everyone goes away with at least one thing they will keep thinking about.
LB: Something I’ve been hearing a lot, when folks are talking about things like access or broader diversity and inclusion, is the word “normalize” being used all the time: “Let’s normalize asking for help,” or “normalize flexible schedules.” And I have the history of normalization in the back of my head whenever that word comes up, including the many kinds of violence enacted on disabled bodies in the name of the so-called normal. Your comments about universal design were making me think about this, because there is an implied normalizing impulse in the idea that our access solutions should work for everybody. Is normalization really the framework we want to be using?
MP: I know—should we be excited about that? Another weird thing is it abruptly discards everyone for whom the things being “normalized” are already normal.
LB: Exactly. And there will always be people for whom normalization is not possible or even desirable.
MP: Yes, there are a bunch of implications to that phrase that go in disturbing directions. I teach about the rhetoric of health and wellness a lot. One exercise that it occurs to me would be so fun to do with students would be taking that phrase “normalize asking for help” and making a list of other verbs that we could use there. Invite asking for help, popularize asking for help, flagrantly ask for help. That last one isn’t a verb, but wouldn’t that be a fun exercise, to replace that verb and notice the operation of the verb normalize?
LB: It feels bound up with all the ways that institutions can be immovable and resistant to experimentation in their default to standard procedures. And something that I saw in a lot of the stories in your book is a total mismatch between the devastating lack of access or exclusion that people are facing within these institutions and the stone-faced institutional response: “We will look into that, we need to go through the appropriate channels, and it is going to take X amount of time.” The impulse to normalize or standardize is behind a lot of that. Do you have any optimism about the potential to break through some of those institutional hardenings?
MP: I really do, or I wouldn’t still be in this gig. 
This article was commissioned by Liz Bowen.
Featured image: Margaret Price