Dale Katherine Ireland coined the term uncanny accommodation to describe accommodations that should work from a conventional non-disabled point of view but do not work. Uncanny accommodations help show the separation between non-disabled knowledge of access and crip spacetime, since in crip spacetime rather than access being garaunteed before hand through a single accommodation it becomes a web of interactions between access, relations, space, and objects.

Uncanny Accommodation

Price uses Bea's experience to critique models of accommodation in higher education. Price notes that under an accommodation model paratransit solves the issue of Bea's mobility needs there is no room for the more uncanny accommodation problem of disabled folks being harmed by paratransit drivers.

Price discusses how Bea, a deaf straight white woman with atypical vision who is an assistance professor, doesn't drive. Bea uses paratransit to navigate her large car-oriented campus. Bea discussed how a paratransit driver started proselytizing and discussing his evangelical Christianity with Bea when she was in a vehicle. It got to the point where Bea felt like her only options were either not talking to the driver or trying to steer the conversation to other things. Bea noted that at one point the driver detained her in the vehicle to show her photos of solar panels, a move that made Bea late to the class she was teaching.

Example: Bea and Paratransit

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

Crip Spacetime

Bea's experience on paratransit is not abnormal, in an essay published in Disability Visibility, Britney Wilson, a disabled Black woman, discussed a driver urinating in front of her while she was using paratransit in NYC. Similarly, there are accounting of drivers sexually harassing disabled riders, trapping riders in paratransit vehicles, damaging mobility equipment, and playing material over bus speakers that can be triggering to disabled riders.

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