The theory of crip spacetime was developed through data from the Disabled Academics Study which is a multi-year study drawing on a survey with more than 250 disabled respondents, interviews conducted with thirty eight disabled academics and published accounts by disabled academics. The study launched in 2012. 

Methodology of Crip Spacetime

Crip spacetime is a form of pluriversal politics. Arturo Escobar defined pluriversal politics as recognizing that the realities of oppressed groups are tangibly different from those of the privileged group and that there is no singular subaltern or marginalized reality, so to exist as someone from an oppressed group you recognize existence is made up of many realities.

Pluriversal politics

Material-discursive refers to how crip spacetime is made up of how individuals interact with the material world and discourse. The hyphen between material and discursive shows that there is not a neat dividing line between material and discursive since they are both coconstitutive. 

Material-discursive

Price uses the term crip as defined in her work "The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain" to describe someone who engages in the act of cripping which is to use the disruptive potential of disability to call into question normative spaces, positionalities, and interactions. 

Crip

Price situates crip spacetime as a distinct reality that is often not perceptible to those not experiencing it.  Perceptibility is defined by Kerschbaum to not simply look at misunderstanding or omission but rather to encapsulate a process of attention and dis-attention.

Perceptibility

Price outlines the following as the scholarship and ways of knowing Price has drawn from in theorizing Crip Spacetime:
- Critical Disability Studies
- Crip-of-Color Critique
- Material Rhetorics

Scholarship where Crip Spacetime is Situated

Crip spacetime is a material-discursive reality situated in the pluriverse and experienced by disabled people.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Counter to the idea that disability can be fixed, meaning kept in one spot or in a knowable way, Dale Katherine Ireland argues that disability is an uncanny problem meaning that it resists being written into policy or existing in a fixed way. 

Disability as an Uncanny Problem

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

Crip Spacetime

Disability exists as both a hypervisible and invisible experience. Space, time, costs, and relationality make disability a in/visible experience. For instance there are times disabled individuals are asked to make their needs hypervisible - pleading case to ten people for accommodations. Yet, disability can also be invisible, often disabled workers are pushed to work remotely, pushed out of public life, or forced to mask their disabled experience and pain. There are also times were in/visibility collides for instance since in the United States most meetings are taken when sitting a disabled worker who uses crutches might be asked "what happened?" when they stand up using crutches after a meeting despite the fact that they have used crutches for years.

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