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Cripping Conferences: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Disability in Academia

In Brief This paper employs autoethnography to expose the conference experiences of disabled scholars within the academic and library fields, highlighting the systemic barriers found in these professional settings. In integrating personal narratives with theoretical insights, this study highlights how rigid conference spaces and norms do not accommodate disabled bodyminds, which hinders professional development, and highlights the need for systemic changes. The barriers found include the mental load of navigating inaccessible spaces, the extra financial costs required for participation, and interference between the clock time of conferences and the crip time of disabled bodyminds. While conferences provide challenges, we also find them to be a place for crip connections, as seen in the authors’ friendship that provides both emotional and professional support. This paper concludes with theoretical implications for making conferences more accessible and the disentanglement of libraries and academia from their ideas of productivity and ideal workers.

By Rhys Dreeszen Bowman and Leah T. Dudak

Introduction

Positionality

Rhys Dreeszen Bowman (they/them) is a white, queer, nonbinary Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Carolina. They are a former high school librarian in rural New England. They have a middle-class family background and are also privileged in their whiteness, access to education, and status as a citizen. Rhys is physically disabled and chronically and mentally ill. Rhys is sometimes invisibly disabled and sometimes uses a mobility aid. They often can conceal their disability and pass as nondisabled, which reduces the ableism they experience. Passing as nondisabled also affects their ability to meet their accessibility needs and navigate the world.

Leah T. Dudak (she/her) is a white, cis, female, fat, librarian, and Ph.D. student at Syracuse University. She is disabled with diagnoses of fibromyalgia, dysgraphia, anxiety, and depression. She sees her body as disabled, but her disabilities are often invisible, so people cannot outwardly see them unless she uses a mobility aid or discloses her disability. Meanwhile, her body also carries immense privilege of sometimes passing as nondisabled, as well as the privileges of race, sexuality/gender, education, and socioeconomic status.

Note on language

We use the term bodymind because we consider the physical body and mind inseparable and to act in concert (Price, 2011). We resist the Western assumption that the body and mind are distinct and the privileging of the mind over the body (Clare, 2017). We also use the term crip to move our conversation outside the insular walls of academia and link our work to disability justice activists and the tangible lives of disabled people, moving beyond a disability rights movement that is primarily concerned with helping white men integrate into mainstream society as productive citizens (Hamraie, 2017). We align ourselves instead with the disability justice revolution, built by queer and trans Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) activists, that fights for the liberation of all sick/unwell/mad/neurodivergent/crip bodyminds.

Literature Review

We add to the tradition of disability scholars attuning to the role of disability and resistance in academia. In Activist Affordances, Dokumaci (2023) uses visual ethnography to chronicle the lives of invisibly disabled people related to arthritis and other inflammatory diseases. Dokumaci attunes to what she calls “unnoticed choreographies,” or the everyday actions disabled people take to move through the world (p. 2). The author calls activist affordances the “performative microacts/arts through which disabled people enact and bring into being the worlds that are not already available to them, the worlds they need and which to dwell in” (pp. 2-3). She posits that disabled futures already exist and activist affordances are “outposts” of these worlds. We draw on Dokumaci’s work to frame our disabled resistance within academia and the possibilities we find for disabled futurities.

In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Harney and Moten (2013) examine how institutions such as the university impede our ability to empathize and our capacity to love. They call the undercommons a “maroon community” of teachers and students that “refuse to ask for recognition and instead want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places we know lie beyond its walls” (p. 6). They argue that the university is designed to uphold capitalism, and the university creates a free labor source to benefit the State. We borrow from Harney and Moten’s understanding of the university as an agent of capitalism, extending their argument to the way the neoliberal values of academia limit and harm disabled academics.

Additionally, this work is adding to already existing literature around the inaccessibility of conferences such as Manwiller’s (2019) article highlighting how conferences can often be the hardest part of being an academic and harder than any other professional experience. In her follow-up critique of the 2021 ACRL conference, she writes: “At the time, I thought it was my responsibility to adapt to the conference setting if I wanted to be professionally active” (2021). Finally, she questions why library organizations act and conduct business as if disabled workers do not exist. Below, we expand upon Manwiller’s articles and discuss this tension between participating in a conference and creating our own space, but also demanding to be accommodated in the rest of this work.

Price (2011) challenges the academic assumption that disability affects the body while the mind remains untouched by illness. She pushes understandings of disability and education practices to include mental disability. Price challenges readers to reconsider ableist academic values such as productivity and independence and how they damage disabled people. Andersen (2024) uses autoethnography to interrogate how disability impacts the author’s experience as a librarian. Anderson notes how writing in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) focuses on how libraries can serve patrons with disabilities, ignoring the possibility that librarians could themselves be disabled.

Theoretical framework

Autoethnography as a method

Autoethnography empowers us to share our experience and, in doing so, speak back to the silence that frames illness as private and unspeakable, which allows us to open a conversation about what it means to participate in librarianship and academia in bodyminds that are devalued and excluded. We argue that autoethnography is a crip methodology. When one’s own bodymind becomes the site of research, there is no need to travel or schedule to conduct interviews, which can tax the body and ignores our need for sudden rest. Conducting research on ourselves allows us to research as it suits our bodies. We work when we are able and rest when we need to. Crip autoethnography also values disabled stories as knowledge that is worthy of study (Richards, 2008; Kasnitz, 2020). We position ourselves as both subjects and objects, and through storytelling construct knowledge (Ellis, 2004). In this, we are not creating universal truths but sharing just as valid individual ones, which can still create disruption and push change.

We use autoethnography to connect the personal and political and “show how stories become the change we want to see in the world” (Holman Jones & Harris, 2019). Our research addresses the injustice within librarianship, academia, and within our own research (Madison, 2012). By analyzing our stories, we advance knowledge and offer possibilities for new practices. Using Kafer (2013) as a model, we tie crip autoethnography to queer autoethnography to focus on subjugated knowledges. Queering autoethnography speaks truth to power and in “that speaking enacts new worlds. Not just records them” (Holman Jones & Harris, 2019, p. 64).

Additionally, oftentimes, disability and chronic illness are written about from a medicalized point of view to inform caregivers or medical professionals. However, in this, the voice of the patient/client/disabled individual is often ignored (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). As such, disabled bodies become something that is worked on, rather than an active participant in care. Autoethnography allows us to say in our own words our experiences, needs, wants, and desires without our stories then being filtered through a medicalized lens. This filtering erases our voice, but through autoethnography, we fully claim it, appreciate ourselves as experts, and analyze it in our own terms (Kasnitz, 2020; Richards, 2008). While many critics of autoethnography may see this closeness as a flaw, we see it as a reclamation of voice and story.

We also acknowledge that there is no one disabled experience, which is why we are writing together in some sections (such as this one) and also separately, even though we are both academics who share a discipline. We are both insiders and outsiders to each other (Richards, 2008). In using autoethnography, we give voice to our similarities and differences, which allows us to open a world of possibilities.

Crip time

We frame our experience of conference attendance through the lens of crip time, popularized by Alison Kafer (2013) in her book Feminist Queer Crip, who uses crip time to discuss the way time operates differently for queer and disabled people. Disabled people move at a slower (or faster) space than normative society and might need more time to complete tasks or may be late to meetings due to navigating an inaccessible physical world. It is in direct conflict with normative[1] or clock time. We lose time to doctor visits, surgeries, and days spent in bed. Simple acts often result in the need for time to rest and recover. The adage that everyone has the same 24 hours crumbles upon an examination of disabled relationships with time. Kuppers calls crip time a “temporal shifting” (2014, paragraph 2), a way we slip out of place with clock time or the time at which normative society functions. Clock time is the time zone of neoliberal capitalism, while crip time belongs to the land of the ill. Samuels (2017) writes that

crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings (paragraph 5).

Crip time pushes disabled people out of time. The challenge and impossibility of operating on clock time is invisibilized and often overlooked when considering accessibility. Kafer suggests, “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (2013, p. 27). Crip time is then a crucial feature of disabled experiences and must be considered when creating spaces welcoming of all bodyminds.

Chronopolitics is another way of understanding time as intrinsically tied to political behavior. Since bodies are inherently political, especially disabled ones, how disabled bodies move in time becomes a political behavior. The modern concept of time as we understand it was “discovered” in the fifteenth century, partly in order to frame new modern ideas of societal and individual progress. This conception of time led to ideas of human destiny, which motivated colonial projects across Europe and The United States (Toulmin & Goodfield, 1965). Time itself is socially constructed through political processes (Becker, 2019). Chronopolitics creates and maintains clock time. Within a university setting, Zembylas (2023) argues that chronopolitics is the “affective milieus”—how everyday interactions between individuals and their surroundings are imbued with power dynamics–within institutions of higher learning, as he:

…draws on existing studies in neoliberal academia to argue that changing academics’ affective habits created by dominant time discourses and practices requires the disruption of affective milieus in which time is channeled, routed and molded (2023 p. 493).

Zembylas proposes the liberatory potential of disrupting the chronopolitics of neoliberal academia. Within academia, chronopolitics functions as a hyperfocus on speed, efficiency, productivity, and manageability. Chronopolitics “…refers to the politics of time governing academic knowledge generation, epistemic entities, and academic lives and careers, as well as academic management processes more broadly speaking” (Felt, 2017, p. 54). In their autoethnography, Isaacs (2020) discusses the harm caused when disabled bodies, specifically bodies who stutter or do not speak efficiently, come into conflict with chronopolitics. These bodies are punished for their slowness and inability to meet the fast pace necessitated by chronopolitics. These functions of chronopolitics within academia align with neoliberal goals. Chronopolitics is the clock time that disabled bodyminds fail to adhere to, whose authority crip time pushes back against. Functioning within higher education, conferences are impacted by chronopolitics. When we are late to sessions because of our disability, we are punished for our lateness. The pressure to attend conferences to advance our careers is caused by the need to adhere to this academic time.

The neoliberalism of librarianship and academia

Many scholars have argued that academia is rooted in a tyrannical neoliberalism from which we must liberate ourselves for a more just and inclusive culture. The same neoliberal values can be found in librarianship and library work (Brady, 2023). Neoliberalism’s conception of the ideal worker is defined by the rigorous expectations for publishing and near-constant production.

This notion of the ideal worker sets the standard for accountability and performance in neoliberal higher education [and librarianship]. For example, performance-based research funding and reward systems now determine the kind of research projects, academic units, and professional behaviors that are valued (Vázquez & Levin, 2022, paragraph 3).

The endless grind of both librarianship and academia in the battle for higher prestige, doing more with less, constant production, and what Beretz calls the “academic culture of heroic stamina” (2003, p. 52), which ignores the mental and physical consequences, especially for marginalized folks that already face additional barriers to their participation. Vázquez and Levin (2022) argue that neoliberalism results in symbolic violence stemming from the “managerial practices” of neoliberalism. We use crip theory as a framework and materialist critique to examine the ways both librarianship and academia, which are steeped in neoliberal values of productivity, composes disabled bodies. Despite moves in librarianship and academia to be more inclusive and focus on diverse hiring, a perception remains that physically disabled people are unable to produce adequately, and production is the ultimate neoliberal goal. Even when disabled academics are able to conform to academia’s rigorous expectations for production, they are still punished or experience adverse long-term effects on productivity, morale, job satisfaction, physical or mental health (Pionke, 2019). Tenure and advancement within academia are not based solely on merit but on personality politics of who is seen to “fit” within academic culture, which often excludes any disabled people. Neoliberalism is firmly rooted in white supremacy. We acknowledge that with our whiteness, we are complicit in neoliberalism and the harm it causes.​​

Discussion and findings

Mental Load

Mental load is often used to describe the invisible mental work that is done by women in the household to continually keep things running, involving things like planning, anticipating, and organizing (Emma, 2018). We take this concept of invisible mental work and apply it to disability, highlighting the extra planning, considerations, and thoughts that disabled people have to navigate a conference setting. For example,

Leah

Pre conference:

  • Can I even go to this conference and rest with my schedule?
  • Will travel cause me pain before I even get there?
  • Can I afford to miss this conference?
  • How many days is this conference? How much standing and walking will be there?
  • What is their policy if I cannot attend?

Conference:

  • What is better, sitting on too small seats that hurt or sitting on the floor?
  • How long can I stand while having this conversation? Is there somewhere I can move it to with chairs? Will the chairs accommodate my fat body?
  • What can I afford to miss so I can rest?
  • What will I miss not being able to walk to far restaurants?
  • How much will it cost me to Uber back to the hotel and can I afford it?
  • Why does it feel like we have to stand for posters? Will people judge me or not talk to me if I sit? Now that I am sitting it feels like I am physically being talked down to.
  • Why is no one wearing a mask?
  • I am holding up the crowd by moving too slow?
  • How long can I just sit in the bathroom to get a break without people noticing?
  • Why isn’t anything captioned?
  • I feel guilty that the school is paying for this and I cannot go to more things.
  • Will my professor/connection/friend be okay if I do not go to their session because I need to rest?
  • Who can I tell I am disabled? Will they understand this conference is not structured for me?
  • Does my roommate mind that they have to be quiet because I am resting?

Post conference:

  • What did I miss out on?
  • I am jealous of colleagues who got to do things while I stayed in and rested.
  • So many other people seem energized by what they experienced and are ready to jump into something new, I just want to sleep.
  • Am I getting sick?
  • I am burning through travel money quicker than my peers.
  • I don’t want to go to any conferences ever again.

The above sketch is just a fraction of the thoughts that continually bombard my consciousness as I am getting ready for, going to, and following a conference. Typically, I am good at silencing racing thoughts, but during a conference these are ongoing. When a space is clearly not created for you, it takes more energy, advocacy, and creativity to navigate.

At a conference, I have the mentality of a marathon runner (something I could never do in real life): I am strategizing when to rest, when to spend, and those calculations need to be made ahead of time. I do not have the luxury of listening to my body in the moment and adjusting. If my body’s pain starts to get worse, my calculations are wrong and it is already too late. I am masking the inner turmoil these decisions cause, because I know if others could see my racing brain they would be uncomfortable, so instead I hold this discomfort for them. With my mental calculations, I try to predict the future, for my body, career, and connections with others. Ultimately, it is a zero-sum game, even when I win in one of those three areas, I lose in others.

Even if the chairs are too small and add more pain to my already pain riddled body, I do not have the luxury of opting out. If I want a career in academia, if I want people to listen to and respect my voice, if I want to be able to continue to pay for the things that keep my body moving such as medication, physical therapy, massage, and more, conferences are required regardless of the toll and damage it does. So I push. Having this mental burden of continually making these decisions makes me feel isolated and distinctly other. This feeling of otherness and the reluctance from academia and librarianship to embrace and accept folks with disabilities (Pionke, 2023) is why I force my way in and make space for myself and others like me. As Beretz highlights, “Illness and injury, after all, are inescapable realities of human life” (2003, p. 51). Since illness is a part of life, I reject the medicalized view that disabled folks are damaged, and demand acceptance for my body now, especially since it will never be healed (Isaacs 2020). We have every right to be able to pursue our passions, ideas, curiosities, and voice just like our nondisabled peers. And I will claim that space for myself, and others, even if it exhausts me to my core. Accessibility is not the responsibility of the individual; it is the responsibility of the system (Manwiller 2021).

Disability Tax

The concept of a disability tax refers to the fact that it is often more expensive to move through the world in a disabled body (Olsen et al., 2022). In our disabled bodies, conference attendance is significantly more expensive for us than it is for many of our peers.

Rhys

When I travel through the airport, I need to tip the workers who push my wheelchair. I sometimes travel with an assistive device, which is cumbersome and expensive. The difficulty of moving through the airport means I need to pay to check a bag, as it would be too taxing to navigate me, my rollator, and a carry-on bag. I am denied the privilege of a free carry-on bag if I decide to travel with my assistive device. I cannot take public transportation while carrying a heavy bag and, therefore, need to take a taxi or Uber to and from the airport. I need to stay at the conference hotel to rest between sessions and reduce commute time to the conference. It is hard for me to share a room with peers, as during conferences, I often fall asleep by 7 p.m. to rest up for the next day. Many of my friends will stay up to forty minutes away from the conference in a cheaper area, as a group, and take public transportation to attend the conference. None of these cost-saving measures are possible for me. I need to be able to rest between sessions. I also must arrive the day before the conference and pay for that extra night. It is impossible for me to take an early morning flight and attend conference sessions on the same day. Paying for an extra night before and after the conference is challenging on a graduate student’s budget. Attending conferences as a disabled person is costly for me, both the cost to my health from exerting myself and the financial cost of funding a conference trip in a disabled body.

Despite these challenges, I continue to attend conferences because they are required to succeed as an academic. I need a venue to share my work, to network with colleagues, and yes, get lines for my CV. Some days, it all feels like too much, and I wonder if academia is the best place for me. But I feel a stubbornness and a refusal to be forced out. I know that my scholarly work matters and that our field needs people who are pushing back in the ways I am. If I were to give up, that would be one less disabled voice holding academia to task and pushing for a more inclusive and accessible culture. And also, I do this work because I can. While there is a financial and physical toll on me, I am able to succeed in academia despite what it costs me. I have periods of relative health when I am able to work the long hours required for this field. I have the kind of brain that allows me to work on projects weeks ahead of their deadlines so that even if I need to take time off when I’m ill, I can mostly complete my work on time. Most of the time, unless I am using my mobility aid, I am invisibly disabled. While there is pain that comes with not being seen, there is also a privilege in being seen as nondisabled and receiving the accompanying advancements. I am white and do not experience additional barriers in academia because of my race.

It is likely that while I experience some disadvantages because of my disability, gender, and queerness, I mostly benefit from academia’s exclusionary politics. I do this work for those who can’t or won’t, so disabled voices are still heard in academia. I do this work because the cost I pay is so much less than the cost many people experience. And also because I love it. I love the challenge and living in a world of ideas. I love that I spend my days writing and thinking, and I love that I can do this work with my friends. So even when it’s hard, and even when there are days I want to give up, I know I won’t. I’m in it for the long haul.

Crip time

Rhys

After conferences, I often spend up to a week in bed recovering and am unable to work. I become anxious about missing deadlines, and I worry I won’t ever feel any better. It is hard to explain to my professors and peers why I need so much rest after conferences, when they are able to return to work the day after traveling back from a conference. I feel frustrated by the toll the conferences take on me and my need to rest. Even those who know about my disability don’t understand what it’s like to exist in my body. It is hard to take the break I need in an academic culture where there is no expectation that rest might be needed. I find myself doubting my chosen career and wondering if I can make it through another conference. Kafer writes, “we are all to be smoothly running engines and disability renders us defective products” (2013, p. 54). When I can’t get out of bed for a week and deadlines pile up, I am made to feel like a defective product, a far cry from academia’s ideal worker.

This conflict between my body and the expectations of my profession can be explained through a consideration of crip time and chronopolitics. Conferences, libraries, and larger academic institutions have a hyper-focus on clock time, governed by chronopolitics. The conference clock time is an impossibility in the crip time chronically ill people exist in. Sleeping in and going to bed early to preserve energy forces us to miss sessions and opportunities. Waiting for the one accessible bathroom or the time it takes to navigate large conference halls makes us late to sessions. We are seen as failing when we cannot conform to the demands of conference tine. And after the conference is over, the conflict between clock time and crip time only worsens. The penalties of conference attendance and forced conformity to clock time force us into bed and even further out of time. In the autoethnography of her stroke, Jane Speedy (2015) writes about the way time collapses when one is ill and in bed. For Speedy, illness calls into question one’s “situatedness” (p. 37). Time slows to a snail’s pace as we spend an hour staring at the wall or the inside of our eyelids. And time becomes fast, jumping forward when we sleep for hours and wake to find the sky already dark. Kafer (2013) writes that illness and disability impact how one experiences time: “Not only might they cause time to slow, or to be experienced in quick bursts, they can lead to feelings of asynchronicity or temporal dissonance” (p. 34). This disabled experience of time forces a departure from clock time or what Kafer calls straight time with its insistence on “firm delineation between past/present/future” (p. 34).

Crip connections

Carework is an idea coined by disabled writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) to frame the work done by and within disabled communities of color as acts of love rather than chores or obligations. Distancing themself from traditional ideas of caring for disabled people as a burden, Piepzna-Samarasinha argues that caring for one another is a way to build power and foster communities where no one is left behind. We draw from the work of Black and brown queer femmes who centers the importance of care and connection to use the idea of carework to offer new possibilities for both librarianship and academia, freed from neoliberal preoccupations with productivity that exclude disabled people. By making crip connections, we can create care networks that oppose typical productivity, embrace rest, and lead with care (Hersey, 2022). We offer care not because we feel obligated but because it is a radical way we can show our love for one another.

Rhys and Leah

While conferences have many consequences for chronically ill people, they also offer moments of connection. We the authors, Leah and Rhys, met at a conference in 2022, and the friendship that has blossomed offers us both support and solidarity to persist in an ableist and often hostile climate. Crip community makes withstanding the hurdles of conference attendance more possible as it offers togetherness and knowledge that one is not alone. Living across the country from one another, we only see each other in person when we travel to the same conference. While conferences are hard on our body, the opportunity for us to connect is a lifeline for us within academia. Upon our first meeting, we processed our grief and rage over a lack of COVID precautions over text.

Leah: The last thing I wanted to say is how this conference has COVID policy in place, but they could submit a negative test like two weeks ago? How does that help? Okay, thank you for letting me get this out lol.

Rhys: It’s so ridiculous. People want a checkbox that they’ve done the right thing but are unwilling to take steps to keep people safe. Which I know is the same with literally everything else in our society but it’s heartbreaking watching it unfold when it could be different.

Leah: Agreed. And when it’s something so small as a mask.

This conference was held in 2022. By 2024, almost all conferences have dropped all pretense of COVID precautions despite the reality that at the time of this writing, COVID is still a concern for us as disabled people: we don’t need to get another disability like Long COVID; this is not Pokémon, we do not need to catch them all. Our friendship allows us space to express our deep rage and feel less isolated in our experience. Malatino writes of an “infrapolitical ethics of care” which he calls “a reliance on a community of friends to protect and defend one from violence, to witness and mirror each other’s rage, in empathy, and to support one another during and after the breaking that accompanies rage” (2022, p. 118). We offer each other the refuge to express and mirror our anger.

Participating in conferences together also offers the validation of the experiences and the struggles that accompany attendance, which makes conferences a bit more bearable. It is difficult to explain to nondisabled people what it’s like to exist in our bodies and how impossible it can feel. Rhys was encouraged by a professor to attend a doctoral poster session held after a long day of sessions. Rhys made it out of their hotel room and to the event hall but was immediately overwhelmed by the mass of unmasked people, the noise, and the lack of chairs and retreated to bed. They texted Leah, “I was feeling too shitty to go to the posters, so I ate pizza in bed.” Leah validated this decision to prioritize their health and rest in bed rather than pushing through, which would lead to an even bigger collapse later on. As we parted ways at the end of the conference, we both expressed our joy at meeting one another and promised to stay in touch.

Leah: Please stay in touch, Always happy for rants, successes, and just general life being a disabled grad student. I’m really glad we connected.

Rhys: I am too! You’re my first disabled PhD person so I will definitely take you up on that.

In the two years that followed, Leah and Rhys text each other regularly for support and to celebrate accomplishments. And our friendship has evolved into a professional partnership with the writing of this and other autoethnographies examining our experiences. Our friendship offers support that is unavailable to us through traditional socialization within the university. Celebrating our successes together allows us to create an independent rewards system to sustain our energy in a culture where rewards are withheld and often portioned out in racist, sexist, heterosexist, and ableist ways (Museus & LePeau, 2020).

Within our friendship, we are also creating a small culture of care in academia and librarianship. These systems of power do not love us back, we all need and give care along with the time, support, and resources to care well (Segal, 2023). By caring for each other, and embracing crip time, we create pockets of space and time for care where none exists. We reject the neoliberalism of capitalism together by caring for and validating each other. And this is why we continue to do the work and go to conferences. When we go to conferences and bring carework with us, we are disrupting both the conference and academic systems by creating belonging where there was none. We also go to conferences because it is when we are able to see each other and maintain our relationship which has proven to be an important lifeline in both our personal and professional lives. We also talk about things outside of our academic experience, expanding our two person care network outward and further into the liminal crip time. Capitalistic systems are not built with care, and by creating systems of care, we further push against capitalistic expectations of librarianship and academia (Hersey, 2022; Segal, 2023; Kafai, 2021).

Conclusion and implications

Theoretical implications

 This article is just one small conversation within a larger discussion of how to disentangle libraries and academia from their insistence on production and value of the ideal worker. While making conferences more accessible is a place to begin, until the pace of librarianship and academia changes chronically ill folks will face the same ruptures of crip time and clock time that impede our success. In our writing, we turn to the future and what might be by using autoethnography, enabling us to attune to queer and crip futurity. Muñoz (2009) conceptualized queer futurities as “what’s not yet here”; these futures “insist on another time and place that is simultaneously not here yet but also to be glimpsed in our horizon (p. 183). Inspired by Muñoz, we use our stories to reflect on what has been and ponder what could be. In this crip imagining, we speak into being the futures we want for ourselves. We manifest futures where rest is prioritized, where crip knowledge is valued and disabled people share with our well and nondisabled peers the lessons about wellbeing and community care. We aspire to a future where burnout is not glorified, where academics do not compete over who can work the most, where diverse work paces are considered for promotion. We imagine a future for library and information science where crip methodologies are esteemed as rigorous and given space in leading journals.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Internal Peer reviewer – Brea McQueen ; External Peer reviewer – JJ Pionke; and Editorial Board member Jess Schomberg for their kindness and help with this work. We would also like to honor our crip connection as authors for allowing this co-written scholarship and thank our bodyminds for producing this work.

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[1] Other marginalized groups such as people of color and queer and trans people, and people in the Global South also have complicated relationships with clock time and often fail to operate on the schedule of normative time. By normative time, we mean a time system governed by Western, white, non-disabled, cisgender, and heterosexual society.

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