Crip Space/Time: A Conversation with Dr. Margaret Price

Margaret Price is a genderqueer femme and scholar of rhetoric, disability studies, and qualitative methods. Her book Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (Duke University Press, 2024) won the 2024 Alison Piepmeier Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Her first book, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (University of Michigan Press, 2011), won the Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC). Price is co-PI of the Transformative Access Project and received a 2020 Fulbright Research Award. She is an avid knitter and inline skater.

 

Karen Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley. Her first book was titled Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006). Her next project resulted in two ethnographic films and a monograph titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). She is currently working on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in postwar Japan as well as a project on disability, technology, and access especially in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI/ML). She currently runs the UC Berkeley Disability Lab and the Othering and Belonging Institute's Disability Studies research cluster.

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 three hundred interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual accommodations—the primary way universities address accessibility—actually impede access rather than enhance it. She argues that the pains and injustices encountered by academia’s disabled workers result in their living and working in realities different from 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 marginalized 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.