Critical Disability Studies has the word critical in the title to tie it to other disciplines in critical studies. Based on frameworks of critical studies, critical disability studies looks at disability as a construct or category created by current political and social systems to uphold existing power relations and systems. Because of this Critical Disability Studies is more interested with questions about the larger system that labels some bodies as disabled while also being grounded in the importance of embodiment, lived experience, and relationships with those outside of the academy. 

Critical Disability Studies

Crip-of-Color Critique was coined by Jina Kim and Sami Schalk as a concept located at the nexus of feminist of color, queer of color, and disability studies theories. Crip-of-Color Critique is the idea that ableism is not just entwined with but is casually related to other axes of oppression including racism, classism, and sexism, and that there are counter-stories and counter-knowledges that are pushed back against ableism that are practiced and come from disabled, queer, low-income Black and brown communities.

Crip-of-Color Critique 

Material Rhetorics is a concept based on the idea that some of the more modern assumptions of rhetorics should be challenged and moved beyond. 

Material Rhetorics

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

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.

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 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.

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