Price discusses how one participant, Tom, discussed how after having a brain tumor removed, he had bad balance that would make walking down the hallways hard and it would be harder if he had to navigate around a group of people. Price point's out Tom's experience is an example of how mobility can change over time and with different people and that even for people who can walk, mobility is not stable or a binary state. 

Tom and his Brain Tumor

Price discusses how one participant, Adrian had trouble moving through large parking lots at her university because she had previously been stalked by one of her former students in those parking lots. Adrian has accommodations because of her limb amputation that require she waits alone in those parking lots for paratransit services to take her to her office or classroom. Price points out how Adrian's past trauma has impacted her mobility in ways that aren't often thought about when we design systems of accommodation or access on college campuses.

Adrian and Parking Lots

Price notes how Denise, a blind professor, when attending one of her first large academic conferences, had to spend lots of energy trying to navigate around people in busy hallways or engage in small informal networking situations, so she decided she was going to have her husband come with her to future conferences. Denise noted that she preferred her husband because the rushed pace of the conference didn't lend itself toward asking for help from a conference organizer, using paid assistants increased the likelihood she experienced infantilization, and her husband was able to identify people Denise knew she needed to network with informally in a way a paid aid might not be able to. Price notes that Denise's experience shows how, while a conference building could be physically accessible, time and accompaniment can overlap to create crip spacetime and ways of inaccess that are not perceptible to non-disabled conference organizers.

Denise and Academic Conferences

Price notes that participants discussed how mobility needs weren't always visible and their mobility was impacted by not just the accessibility of a physical space but also by time and relations.

Price notes that in Disability Studies, mobility refers to whether an individual's bodymind moves in a particular way, for instance walking or rolling. Mobility is also used in disability studies as a category, for instance mobility disability.

Mobility in Disability Studies

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

Crip Spacetime

Price notes that categorization of disability can be unhelpful because it can reaffirm existing relations of power and oppression, and that we have to be wary of categorization systems that may work to separate disabled people into those deemed worthy or unworthy by neoliberal aims. For instance, disabled folks may use categorization to distance themselves from individuals deemed intellectually disabled because of histories of abled people being infantalizing toward disabled people out of an ableist assumption that all disabled people were intellectually disabled. However, the categorization can aid in the abandonment of intellectually disabled people by others.

Price's Critique of Disability Categorization

Mobility Visibility

Price notes that often disabled people are asked to rely on access workers, whether it be interpreters, captioners, paratransit drivers, etc. While these individuals are often seen as givens in systems of creating access under an accommodations-based-framework, there can can be problems when these individuals act in ways that create inaccess.

Relationships and Mobility

Price discusses how interviewees noted that they often felt the need to work to make themselves indepensible in often unsecure adjunct positions because many disabled adjunct faculty felt like they both would not be seen as hireable for a tenure-track position and they aren't able to move between universities as easily as non-disabled adjuncts because of having medical care and paramedical care situated in on geographic area.

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