In 2011 when Price began thinking of researching disabled academics there was no large-scale studies of disabled faculty, staff, or graduate students. When studies existed, for instance a National Science Foundation study that looked just at graduating doctoral candidates, it didn't look across a variety of disciplines and was only quantitative. There were some small case studies of first person accounts but there was no larger body of work to find themes between these experiences.

Impetus of the Disabled Academics Study

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. 

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.

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

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