Haunting is defined by Yoon and Chen as being repeatedly visited by affective and sensory aspects of spirits or histories that are not alive and not quite dead - these spirits and histories are often actively unremembered, and haunting occurs through a distorting and repeating of time. Haunting is often caused by violence.

Haunting

Ambient uncertainty can also occur across time; for instance, previous marginalizing experiences can lead to the perception of a consistent risk of that marginalization occuring again. Alternatively, previous marginalization (for instance, not being accommodated at work) can lead to more marginalization (for instance, experiencing poverty).

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Some participants noted that there was a sense of risk or vulnerability around disability that came from a sense of general opinion of people within the institution coming from features of the space around them, rather than any single instance of something being said or done to them.

Ambient Uncertainty

The subcodes Price included under time were:
- Academic clock 
- Conditional time 
- Duration of disability or illness
- Duration of obtaining accommodation(s)
- Duration of using accommodation(s)
- Flexibility
- Pace
- Planning ahead
- Redistribution of course load or work duties
- Repetition/frequency
- Single chance for something
- Stamina
- Suddeness
- Time of day
- Time off during the workday
- Time off (longer term)
- Unpredictability
- Time - Other

Time Subcodes

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Price talks to Irene, an assistant professor, who noted that in a college-sponsored survey more than half of professors at the college she taught at noted they thought that it was an unfair advantage for students to receive accommodations. This lead Irene to decide she was not going to talk about or disclose her own disability to her colleagues. Similar uncertainty lead to other faculty who did disclose their disability to either not disclose via email so that there wouldn't be a paper trail or live in fear that their disability disclosure could impact their ability to get tenure.

Example of Ambient Uncertainty (Irene)

For faculty and graduate students who are immigrants, there is not just anxiety about how disability disclosure would impact their job but, also whether it could impact their ability to get a visa, or even get accommodations and disability services back in their home country, depending on whether they are diagnosed. Additionally, ambient uncertainty is compounded for scholars who are Black, Indigenous, or otherwise a person of colour, and scholars of marginalized genders as ambient uncertainty compounds with other microaggressions and previous harms of the academic system. 

Ambient Uncertainty within Intersecting Systems of Oppression

Price notes that consequences do not have to occur for ambient uncertainty to exist as long as the risk of consequences happening is always there. 

Ambient Uncertainty and Consequences

Ambient Uncertainty and Time

Price contends that based on the discussion of harm, and the need to explicitly include harm in our discussions of space that we must also include harm in our discussions of ambient uncertainty, because sigificant harm can occur through ambient uncertainty.

Ambient Uncertainty and Harm

Price notes ambient uncertainty can also come from the precarity of the possibility of current supports (like accommodations or disability related health benefits) suddenly disappearing because of either bureaucratic redetermination of if someone is eligible or caps on the among of a resource an individual is allowed to use.

Ambient Uncertainty and Bureaucratic Systems

The term academic clock generally refers to the time it is expected, for white male non-disabled students, faculty, or academic staff, to reach a point in their academic career - for instance the tenure clock, which is the policy in most universities that a tenure-track professor is up for tenure review seven years after the start their job at that university, or the time it is expected a student will take to earn their degree. Not abiding by an academic clock can have real consequences - having to take out more in student loans, having a poor tenure review, or being seen as less than peers.

Academic Clock

Conditional time is the idea that if x happens then y will happen. 

Conditional Time

Price points out that, in understanding space as political-relational, space is inseparable from time and relations. Price also notes that this inseparability relates to materialist rhetorics and the idea that space is relational if we are not centering humans or animals as the only beings with animacy and agency.

Space as Political-Relational and Time

Price proposes that the interaction between time and disability, in particular expectations set around time by academic institutions, can cause harm in various ways and that these harms are rarely perceived by those not experiencing these harms or not until a disaster occurs

Harms of Time

Slow Professoring, introduced by Maggie Bergs and Barbara K. Seeber, is a proposed way of asserting Crip Spacetime and Crip Time within academic spaces that often punish slowness by centering deliberation and slowness over acceleration in academic work.

Slow Professoring

Price offers the framing of the Accommodations Loop as a predictable pattern that came forward in interviews around the intertwining of time and accommodations in academia. The Accommodations Loop is made up of five concrete experiences and events: Time-sensitive needs;, Slow system, Emotional cost, Employee uses own resources, and Employee may leave job. In formatting this loop as a figure eight Price signals that these are not discrete or linear events rather disabled academics are in constant travel through these events.

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