Price notes that the experiences on the right side of the accommodations loop, the slow system and time sensitive access needs will intensify the need for employees to use their own resources - through self-accommodating in times when the slow system is not meeting access needs. Additionally, employees may have to explain their self-accommdation or the inadequacy of the slow system to others, heightening emotional costs. This compounding labour and resource extraction for access leads to employees leaving their job as the only way out of the accommodation loop. 

Slow System and Time Sensitive Access Needs Intensifying Cost and Resources

Price notes that Time Sensitive Access Needs and Slow Systems were put on the same curve of the loop because they are intertwined phenomenon. Sometimes accommodations need to be put in place immediately to allow work to continue and prevent harm, especially when an access barrier abruptly arises, but this is often at odds with an slow bureaucratic process around accommodations.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

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

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

Crip Spacetime

Price discusses how requesting accommodations is a time and resource consuming process - employees often have to prove their disabilities over an over again through methods including tests, medical records, or physical demonstrations. This process of proof itself is resource intensive often requiring payment of doctors or degregation of one's bodymind to show a level of symptoms that are legible to non-disabled individuals. Additionally when accommodations are granted bureaucratic delays often prevent them from being put into place right away leading to a time where employees are expected to use their own resources to accommodate themselves. Once the accommodation is in place often the burden is put on the employee or student to coordinate the usage and enforcement of their accommodation.

Employees Uses Own Resources - Accommodations Loop

Slow System and Time Sensitive Access Needs

The center of the accommodations loop, the fulcrum, is noted by Price as representing a well-worn point that disabled academics will pass through many times in traversing the accommodations loop but also as a obscuring point where the institution no longer perceives the labour that happens from the employee to self accommodate.

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