Created by: Sarah Hughes, L. Cynthia Lao, & M. Remi Yergeau
It’s no secret that universities understand disability through the logics of a cost-burden model. This cost-burden model positions disability as a condition antithetical to university life, relegating disability to the domain of individual improvement rather than understanding disability as social, intersectional, and dynamic or as something to be valued. While these bureaucratic dynamics long predated our present moment, COVID has thrown cost-burden models and the routine devaluation of nonnormative bodyminds into stark relief. Our home institution, for example, made national news for its failure to provide needed remote work accommodations to its employees, many of whom have been forced to risk their health and safety in the name of our institution’s “return to normalcy.”
Our university, of course, is not unique in this regard. Crip Time Travel [in progress] winds us through the aggressions of university accommodations, asking fellow travelers to rethink our relationships with time, documentation, surveillance, and digitality. Normalcy mandates clash against crip efforts to create more robust, just infrastructures for supporting disabled students and faculty. In this regard, Crip Time Travel stories the everydayness of institutional violence in the form of a shitty hypertext game: Through the institution, time merely shifts. Time is not given. In this way, there is no “winning” in the accommodation game. If access is the work of risk, then surely it is also the work of reconfiguring institutional tempo/ralities. How might we lurch, tic, and stim to/ward these exploded tempos?