You could always manage well because the whole world had been designed to accommodate you.
This is a super interesting Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. I like the concept of crip temporalities (in plural form) and the way in which Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman (2021: 247-248) discuss and illustrate it:
‘In the time of COVID-19, those who had lived previously with the privilege of normative ability began to learn what sick and disabled people have known forever: that crip time isn’t easy, it isn’t fair, it cannot be reasoned with.
But at the same time…disabled people also see approaches to work and study long denied to us as “unreasonable” accommodations—too expensive, too burdensome, not the way it’s done—suddenly implemented quickly, universally, and with total social acceptance.’
Not only did universities and colleges suddenly supply to some or all of their faculty en masse the technologies, flexibility with deadlines, and professional clock extensions often denied to disabled people.”
I’ve never thought about this move to ‘nonstandard’ ways of teaching and communication from this perspective, but I do find myself enjoying the legitimate ‘slowness’ in academe—not only in Taiwan today but also back then in the UK last year.
That is, normally (as in the chrononormative sense), any form of resistance to the death drive of productivity in universities is neither permitted nor tolerated. Suddenly this becomes largely excusable in the name of care, empathy, ‘solidarity’ (for public health), and ‘reciprocal understanding’, which, however, implies that we have never fully understood people who can’t or don’t follow the schedules and spaces designed only by and for ‘nondisabled’ people—in both medical and social terms.
‘So, if pandemic time is crip time for all—even as features such as seemingly interminable waiting, long days indoors, fear of foreshortened mortality, an increase in or sudden loss of hours spent working, and time lost to managing technology are still unevenly distributed—what forms of justice, human connectivity, and pleasure might emerge from it? (p. 251)’
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