By the time this is posted - all hail the glory that is the auto-scheduling tool - I will be ensconced on a train, whizzing my way to Swansea, Wales. Hello, future me! This minor-league time travel is in honour of an exceptionally kind invitation, made by an exceptionally kind academic Dr Roberta Magnani, the Director of Swansea University’s Centre for Research into Gender, Culture and Society (GENCAS). I will be - I currently am? - giving a seminar as part of the Centre’s series on intersectionality, speaking about ableism in the Academy.
All my temporal dilly-dallying with this post is eminently apt, it turns out, because my paper is all about time , or rather times plural - academic time, disability time, crip time - and temporal slippage, pasts and presents and futures all colliding. Check out my abstract for the full(er) story:
“It’s about time we talked about disability in the Academy. Many, if not most, academics do not disclose their condition(s) for well-grounded fear of discrimination. Neoliberal rhetoric about “productivity” – we must always produce more, we must always be seen to be producing more – is fundamentally ableist. Ever more nominally non-disabled scholars are disabled by the “hyper-work” prescribed by the academic regime. The academic timepiece stops for no-body. And yet, those of us living with disability, we watch – we must watch – different clocks: those which show ‘crip’ time – episodic, non-linear, thickened. It is a radically different temporal orientation than hetero-patriarchal linear time. Radical is the key word here. The logic of crip time offers us a new methodology for medievalist work: a practice of empathetic and politically urgent trans-historical engagement with our sources. What’s more, recognition of time, or manipulation thereof, as a central weapon in the Academy’s dysfunctional arsenal allows for the creation of a broader collective for resistance. If the Academy disables, then let us crip it right back – decentering the neoliberalized normate in our scholarship, in our pedagogy and in our professional lives.”
If you’d like to read my paper, then you’ll find most - though not all - of the material in two chapters which should be published in the near-ish future:
‘Chronic Pain and Illness: Reinstating Crip-Chronic Histories to Forge Affirmative Disability Futures’, in A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jonathan Hsy, Joshua Eyler, and Tory Pearman (London, UK: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2019);
Edited 16/09/19: You can now read the other chapter on the blog here: http://www.medievalshewrote.com/blog/2019/9/15/stopping-the-clocks-precarious-times-in-the-academy
For a flavour of the talk itself, flick through the slides posted below at your leisure. Forget the content, if you like clocks (and watches and venerable timepieces), you will love this deck. And just below that, you can (now) scroll through tweets posted about the talk by myself, and attendees. Check out @RobertaDMagnani’s thread in particular for a summary of my key points.
Edited 19/03/19 to embed the Wakelet and relevant text.