DISCO 2024: Writing (or Not) on Crip Time

Purple flyer advertising the DISCO event "Writing/Making (or Not) on Crip Time."
A flyer with a purple swirled background advertising the DISCO event “Writing/Making (or Not) on Crip Time,” with “crip time” in large, 70s-psychedelic lettering, and four panelist photos, including Vyshali’s. This roundtable conversation considers what it means to write, make, and do (or not!) on crip time. Universities and other institutions typically represent disability through the logics of cost-burden models, which position disability as antithetical to collegiality, punctuality, responsibility, and, often, life. How might we work against, crip, and ultimately dismantle these systems? How might bed rest, deferrals, stims, stutters, and other embodyminded insights help us generate tactics for survival? How might we think about digital activism and disabled collectivity online in ways that provide us respite rather than distress? How might we collectively reimagine the temporalities of labor, care, and composing? © 2023 DISCO

I didn’t use scripted remarks for this roundtable talk, but below are some of the questions that were asked, and my notes to myself. I’m sharing my thoughts only here out of respect to the sensitive nature of many of the disclosures by my co-panelists, attendees, and organizers.

Possible Questions & Answers

Q: How do you think about/practice crip time in your work (e.g., activism, scholarship, creative work, teaching, community care)?

  • Scholarship:
    • Editorial practice: Flexible deadlines to a point for a special issue with an informally written CFP that asked for writing “however composing bodyminds could do it”
    • Scholarship: Multimodal, lyric, dynamic content, often interactive, because it’s compatible with chronic pain and fatigue—where I can focus on the pain inherent to a piece’s form to distract from writing-related pain
  • Teaching:
    • Only two deadlines are real: Can I do it in time, and the end of the semester
  • Creative Work:
    • I work in lyric forms because it’s most compatible with chronic pain and fatigue, which frequently mean I forget what I was writing…lyric allows me to jump around, and compel the reader to jump around, like I do
  • Community:
    • Activism: Trusting in the power of my networks to support me and do what I may lack the bandwidth to do (like alt text)
    • Academia: By publishing work like mine in open-access forums and openly presenting on and discussing my reasons for doing so, I try to change the contours of what “normal” scholarship is

Q: What are some ways of thinking about crip time that have guided your practice?

  • I wrote a piece about using poetics in scholarship and asked for extensions due to pain; I was given very little time, and I had to hurt myself in the end to complete the piece; the editors then took the next few months before getting back to me. This informs my approach: I expect denials or misunderstandings unless I know the editors personally (my own trust issues); I give extensions whenever I can permit them as an editor
  • I offer extensions in my courses with only one caveat: I need to know in advance of the original deadline so I can replan my grading period
  • Finally, I live on crip time so everything is on crip time unless the stakes are high enough. Nothing in academia is ever truly an emergency, although this felt different when I was a student, adjunct, PTL, and now TT professor. This usually means figuring out how to make crip time work within normative time: what can be avoided, reduced, delayed? How can I time my writing to maximize the amount/quality of writing I can get done?

Q: What does it mean to write or compose criply, or neurodivergently, or in/with/through intergenerational trauma? How does that shift across bodyminds and space?

  • Composing with disability and intergenerational trauma means writing in whatever forms (lyric, multimodal, interactive, dynamic) that ease my ability to compose. This for me often means lyric, poetic, embodied prose, game creation, cybertexts
  • Time is explicitly embedded in the chronic part of chronic pain and fatigue, which temporally reorients the disabled subject in the kāla of creation and destruction and the propitious moment of kairos. Kairos in conjunction with kāla offers an understanding of crip time that is cunningly opportunistic and has acceptance and annihilation woven into its fabric, implicitly legitimizing feelings of frustration, sadness, uncertainty, love, and liberation.
  • Time of intergenerational trauma is also protracted and contingent

Q: How might we think about crip time in ways that resist narratives of overcoming and/or narratives of “producing a thing”?

  • I struggle with not thinking about crip time in terms of “producing a thing,” but the productivity narrative is always toxic. I would like to think of crip time not in terms of doing but in terms of being? Like a temporality that facilitates self-healing or at least not self-injurious ways of daily life.
  • I enculturated Tamil Standard Time but acculturated to the Euro-Western linear time of capitalist productivity. Tamil Standard Time means we are notoriously unpunctual, temporally unreliable. It’s cultural and communal, so communally we cultivate a tolerance of delays and lingering, build extra hours around arrivals and departures because everyone is late and ambivalent, head-waggling goodbyes are lengthy social activities in and of themselves. Surrounded by mixed messages about time, you cultivate an awareness of “right” time and “wrong” time and when to abide by which.

Q: What is crip mentoring? (Or, what does it mean to mentor criply?) How does one do that if a community member is not yet ready to “claim crip”?

  • I don’t always use the label “crip” as for cultural reasons I’m not always sure that’s how I think of it. I prefer anomalous embodiment maybe. Being an anomalously embodied mentor means acknowledging the vagaries of the bodymind, which doesn’t require asking a community member to “claim crip.” Anomalous approaches—flexible time—benefits everyone.

Q: What advice do you have for people who are operating from spaces of precarity in highly institutional, bureaucratic, hostile environments?

  • Reclaiming the personal time of kairos, according to Negri (1997/2003), is critical to resistance in contemporary systems of domination. Time is a technique of discipline, from the time-table to the adjustment of the body to temporal imperatives. Time desires maximum speed and efficiency and a disciplined body; wasted time is practically and morally criminal, especially in academia
  • What crip time—or anomalous time, resistive/personal kairos time, whatever you call it—has over chronos time is love and collectivity

Q: How does one work against the institution when they are also working within it? Is that even possible?

  • Not impossible? You work against the institution by working to change its policies and rules. This can occur by publicly illustrating and discussing the merits of certain work, introducing crip time assignments and timelines and crip time-produced work in coursework…teaching and writing on crip time. Even precariously you don’t always have to tell anyone, if your rapport with the class is strong or if the class can perceive that it benefits them