Price offers that the acronym DEI is poorly defined in American academia - what does it mean for an office to be an office of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Often the existence of these offices on collegiate campuses are positioned as the solution to the problem of rampant racism, ableism, misogyny, and queerphobia. Yet, in actuality, these offices often aren't given many tangible tools or actual avenues to address discrimination students are facing. This creates precarity because students, faculty and staff who are already vulnerable because of systemic oppression may be pointed towards an office of DEI by non-marginalized individuals as a resource when these offices have not been given sufficient tangible tools to address discrimination.

Offices of DEI and Precarity

Excludable types incite internalized ableism and make structures of ableism in academia harder to perceive. It is not just that every disabled individual within academia understands and operates within crip spacetime it is that crip spacetime is hard to perceive but  is continuously coming into existence and constituted through agents, objects, spaces and how disabled academics are and others in academia are interacting with them.

Crip Spacetime and Excludable Types

Price situates crip spacetime as precarious. Crip spacetime is in part precarious because of the constant negotiation required between those operating within crip spacetime and those around you. Price points to the idea that one could answer the questions "are you sure you really need that?" or "but why don't you just ask for help?" one hundred times a day without closing the gap of understanding between individuals inhabiting crip spacetime and those who are not around accommodations and how to best create access.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Obscurity is a necessary part of precarity and existing in the pluriverse. According to Price, obscurity is not defined by how obscure your own precarity is to others who share sites of marginalization with you, rather it is how obscure your precarity is to privileged groups. Obscurity is part of the pluriverse and helps construct the pluriverse because it shows how marginalized individuals are forced to endure aspects of reality that are overlooked and not part of the reality of more privileged groups.

Obscurity

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

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