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Welcome to the Disability Justice Book Club Month 2

Margaret Price’s Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life  

Led by Dr. Jennifer Gagnon (and her service dog Ziggy)

Supported by the EDI Scholars-in-Residence Program and the Peña Fund  

Land Acknowledgment

We acknowledge that UBC’s two main campuses are situated within the ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people and in the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples

If this is your first time attending the book club

If you’re joining the Disability Justice Book Club for the first time this month – welcome! We are so excited to have you with us! Please review the Month 1 Discussion Guide which contains important information on the structure of the book club, the two different cohorts: 1) Disabled and Proud and 2) Disability Allies, and ways that we are incorporating Disability Justice into how the book club works. The Month 1 Discussion Guide is available online here.

Accessing the Text:

We will be reading Margaret Price’s book Crip Spacetime. The book is available freely and for purchase in a variety of formats. If you are joining from beyond UBC, open access or your institutional library are likely the simplest to access. As always, if you encounter any challenges accessing the text, or require a different format for accessibility, feel free to reach out directly to Allan Cho (allan.cho@ubc.ca) or Jennifer Gagnon (jennifer.gagnon@ubc.ca) for support.

E-book format (free)

• Available through Open Access as a viewable or downloadable pdf here
• Available at UBC Libraries here

Audio Book

• Available through Audible currently for free here

Paperback format (purchase)

• • Available from the publisher here for $26.95

Confidentiality

A core practice of Disability Justice is confidentiality. Accessibility, safety, and inclusion all require that we are mindful to not disclose confidential information about the lived experiences of others. Many disabled folks have heightened concerns about confidentiality because of their experiences with ableism, discrimination, and marginalization. While some of us might feel comfortable sharing our experiences with disability and ableism, no one is required or expected to disclose. Folks may also not be “out” about their relationship to disability in all contexts and places at UBC and beyond. To further support control over disclosure of our identities and experiences with disability, we have created two cohorts for the Disability Justice book club 1) the Disabled and Proud cohort for folks who self-identify as disabled and who are interested in discussing Disability Justice with other self-identified disabled folks, and 2) the Disability Allies cohort for folks who do not presently identify as disabled or who would prefer not to disclose their relationship to disability. We always assume the presence of disability and access needs in all our meeting spaces. To support confidentiality and safety in these spaces, please treat the experiences of individuals as confidential and do not disclose anyone’s lived experiences without their enthusiastic consent. This Book Club is an opportunity to grow our knowledge and understanding of Disability Justice, and potentially “read yourself in” to Disabled community or explore how disability and ableism are already present in your experiences.

Discussion Guide

Our discussion will centre Margaret Price’s core argument that the model of individual accommodations used by universities to implement access is not only deeply problematic but also a barrier to accessibility in post-secondary contexts. As a collective, we completely understand that reading a whole book prior to our meeting just might not be realistic. With that in mind, as a facilitator I will focus our discussion on core themes from the “Introduction” and “Time Harms” chapter, and the key quotes from throughout the book shared below. If there’s something not captured here that you really want us to take up together in discussion, please feel free to share with Jennifer either before or at our book club meeting. Page numbers given correspond to the print edition of the book, and the citation also gives the relevant chapter.

Discussion Questions and Quotes

1. “Disabled academics know.

We know where the accessible entrance is (not in front). We know if there are cracks or gaps in the sidewalk leading to that entrance. We know if there’s no sidewalk at all, but only a lumpy dirt footpath. We know what to do if the door is locked, with a sign on it saying ‘Handicap assistance call 555-STFU,’ and we know what to do if that number leads to voicemail. We know what kind of handle the door has. If the door is unlocked, we know how heavy it will be. We know what the room we’re going to looks like, and we know how to ask – with charm and deference – if we need the furniture rearranged, the fluorescent lights turned off, the microphone turned on. We know how much pain it will cost to remain sitting upright for the allotted time. We know how to keep track of the growing pain, or fatigue, or need to urinate (there’s no accessible bathroom), and plan our exit with something resembling dignity. We know that no else will ever know.”  (Price, “Introduction”  p. 1)

• • What are your thoughts on this hidden knowledge of what Disabled people know? Does it resonate with you and your experiences with accessibility (or the lack thereof)? Are you surprised by how differently Disabled folks may experience the act of arriving in an academic space?
  • Spoon Theory discusses how Disabled folks need to carefully manage and allocate the limited spoons that they have throughout the day. How does Price’s statement that “Disabled academics know” connect to spoon theory?

2. “We all seemed stuck on that word. Bafflement. We are baffling. We are tired of baffling. We are tired of being baffles. We are tired, period….This project is not about disability alone. It is about all experiences of being baffling— and baffled—in academic life. And therefore it’s also about the meaning and future of academic life. In a sense, the question of inclusion is the question of why an educational institution exists in the first place. If you believe the work of education is (at least sometimes) for the good, then we must find better understandings of what that work is. And we must find better ways of working together.” (Price, “Introduction” 40)

• • What are your thoughts on bafflement, accessibility, inclusion, and disability experience in academic life?

3. “Crip spacetime is a material-discursive reality experienced by disabled people.” (Price, “Introduction” 7)

“Crip spacetime is precarious not only because it’s difficult and often risky to inhabit it, but because it is obscure.” (Price, “Introduction” 13)

“Crip spacetime as a reality is rarely perceptible to those not experiencing it.” (Price, “Time Harms” 74)

• • What is crip spacetime? How do you (or do you?) experience crip spacetime?

4. “As the saying goes, ‘time heals.’ But time also harms.” (Price, “Time Harms” 73)

“Requests for accommodation tend to turn on precise measurements of chronological time, but most disabilities don’t run on chronological time. They run on crip time.” (Price, “Time Harms” 92)

• • How is crip spacetime more than just slowing down? How is it also an acceleration of time, or a falling out of time and space? In other words, how does crip spacetime both reflect time as it is for disabled folks and also distort or change how time and space are perceived?

5. “Many academics know that disability accommodations can be difficult to put in place. But the extreme delays, and the systemic cruelty, built into the accommodations loop might not be as familiar. The loop is arduous to traverse; must be traversed over and over again; and extracts time, money, effort, and emotional cost….The loop is almost always invisible to those not traversing it.” (Price, “Time Harms” 100)

• • How do you react to this statement? What are your thoughts on the accommodations loop?

6. “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.” (Price, “Time Harms” 102)

• • Price argues that accommodations as practiced in academia not only do not work, but also serve as barriers to creating accessibility by defining the Disabled person as a problem to be “fixed” by accommodation. What do you see as the current challenges or problems with the accommodation model? How might a shift towards a system of collective accountability that centres collective access address these challenges?

7. “Among the most striking elements of Mingus’ description [of access intimacy], to me, is that access intimacy can arise suddenly over time. Several interviewees in the Disabled Academics Study described moments when one of their colleagues abruptly seemed to ‘get’ the need for a quick access move…A defining characteristic of access intimacy is that it emerges through particular moments; it is not generalizable. Thus, one of many reasons that access intimacy is incompatible with academe – at least, academe in its oppressive and conservative forms – is that it resists being written into policy… Access Intimacy isn’t a best practice, and it can’t be an item on a checklist.” (Price, “Accompaniment” 159)

• • What do you think of Price’s take on Mia Mingus’ access intimacy? Where is access intimacy possible in academic spaces? Where is access intimacy impossible? Can the accommodations process support access intimacy or is it incompatible with access intimacy?

8. “Gathering forces us to confront the dimensions of crip spacetime—space, time, cost, and accompaniment—and find a way to inhabit it to­gether. Often this cohabitation is painful and messy. But the gathering itself is a refusal to be separated and, thus, a commitment to collective ac­cess.” (Price, “Conclusion” 177–78)

8. • What do you see as the power of gathering? Is gathering (and sharing experiences) a possible way to support true accessibility and inclusion?
   • How are we as a book club and a collective of people doing? Where have we been successful in navigating Crip spacetime? Where can we continue to work towards collective access and accountability?
9. In contrast to the many failures of access that Price discusses, do you have any examples where access was done well?

10. What do you hope others at the university takeaway from this book regarding how to support (and not support) Disabled colleagues and disability inclusion?

Thank you for gathering with us today to discuss Margaret Price’s Crip Spacetime 🙂