Slow Professoring has been critiqued for not addressing the privilege it takes to take up the calls to be a slow professor when there are costs associated with moving slowly in academia.

Critiques of Slow Professoring

Slow Professoring, introduced by Maggie Bergs and Barbara K. Seeber, is a proposed way of asserting Crip Spacetime and Crip Time within academic spaces that often punish slowness by centering deliberation and slowness over acceleration in academic work.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

The subcodes Price included under time were:
- Academic clock 
- Conditional time 
- Duration of disability or illness
- Duration of obtaining accommodation(s)
- Duration of using accommodation(s)
- Flexibility
- Pace
- Planning ahead
- Redistribution of course load or work duties
- Repetition/frequency
- Single chance for something
- Stamina
- Suddeness
- Time of day
- Time off during the workday
- Time off (longer term)
- Unpredictability
- Time - Other

Time Subcodes

Crip Time is a term coined by Ellen Samuels, Allison Kafer, and Margaret Price to explain how disabled or crip bodymind embodiments often have different experiences with time. In particular Samuels, Kafer, and Price pose crip time as an alternative framing of time to counter how disabled individuals often have to place great strains on their bodyminds to meet nondisabled timetables - meet deadlines, be seen as at a similar stage of life to nondisabled peers, work similar 9-5 positions. These timelines fail to understand why disabled bodies' experiences may not be able to nicely fit these expectations. Crip time offers a temporal framing that makes the clock fit the disabled bodymind rather than making the disabled bodymind fit the clock.

Crip Time

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

Crip Spacetime

Berg, Maggie and Barbara K. Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

The term academic clock generally refers to the time it is expected, for white male non-disabled students, faculty, or academic staff, to reach a point in their academic career - for instance the tenure clock, which is the policy in most universities that a tenure-track professor is up for tenure review seven years after the start their job at that university, or the time it is expected a student will take to earn their degree. Not abiding by an academic clock can have real consequences - having to take out more in student loans, having a poor tenure review, or being seen as less than peers.

Academic Clock

Conditional time is the idea that if x happens then y will happen. 

Conditional Time

Price points out that, in understanding space as political-relational, space is inseparable from time and relations. Price also notes that this inseparability relates to materialist rhetorics and the idea that space is relational if we are not centering humans or animals as the only beings with animacy and agency.

Space as Political-Relational and Time

Price proposes that the interaction between time and disability, in particular expectations set around time by academic institutions, can cause harm in various ways and that these harms are rarely perceived by those not experiencing these harms or not until a disaster occurs

Harms of Time

Slow Professoring

Price offers the framing of the Accommodations Loop as a predictable pattern that came forward in interviews around the intertwining of time and accommodations in academia. The Accommodations Loop is made up of five concrete experiences and events: Time-sensitive needs;, Slow system, Emotional cost, Employee uses own resources, and Employee may leave job. In formatting this loop as a figure eight Price signals that these are not discrete or linear events rather disabled academics are in constant travel through these events.

Accommodations Loop

Ambient uncertainty can also occur across time; for instance, previous marginalizing experiences can lead to the perception of a consistent risk of that marginalization occuring again. Alternatively, previous marginalization (for instance, not being accommodated at work) can lead to more marginalization (for instance, experiencing poverty).

Ambient Uncertainty and Time

Higher education, also has non-disabled temporal expectations ingrained and promoted by the institution. These expectations often come up in expectations of how long a student should take to go from matriculation to graduation - which often has financial ties to amounts of scholarships, and institutional ties to how long faculty and administrative staff expect to be working with a student, the institutionalized rhythm of a semester or quarter, the pace of coursework, or the idealized temporal expectations around how students should show up in the class room or approach academic assignments. Disabled students are expected to keep up with this timeline.

The Non-Crip Temporalities of Academia

Crip authenticity refers to practices that center the fluid nature of disability and time that reject ableist assumptions that prescribe normative assumptions for how people are supposed to inhabit their bodies and engage with space and time. Crip authenticity recognizes disability as fluid both throughout a person's lifespan and when individuals move from one context to another.

Crip Authenticity

Price highlights that Thick Temporality becomes even more pertinent when talking about theories of Crip Time including Alison Kafer's discussion of crip time that highlights how while we image crip futurity to leave behind the history of harm, abuse, colonization and slavery that are central to modern and historic definitions of the formation of disability, futurity my reinscribe these things. 

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