Material/materiality refers to how we exist in the world and our embodied realities, notably material/materiality is not meant to mention labels put on our experience or how we sort our selves into groups.

Material

Relating to discourse consisting of how we define who is part of a group both colloquially and through legal, medical, and other formalized definitions

Discursive

To be legible as being disabled builds off material-discursive existences to explain how someone is seen by the broader world as disabled doesn't only affect whether they are called disabled or the words that are used about their existence, and that others expect them to use about their existence, but it also affects how people get access to medications and treatments, and if someone is seen as deserving of accommodation.

Legibility

Karen Barad uses the term entanglement to describe the coconstitutive nature of material and discursive and uses the idea of entanglement to argue that we don't exist in ways that are fully self-contained and free from interaction with multiple frames of existence.

Entanglement

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. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison

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

Crip Spacetime

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

Mignolo, Walter. 2018. "Forward: On Pluriversality and Multipolarity." In Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge, edited by Bernd Reiter, ix-xvi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Forward: On Pluriversality and Multiporality

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

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

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