Crip time

The examples I’ve given in this section should make it clear that, when working with disability, you’re sometimes working in a timeframe and with time pressures different from the ones we journalists have learned to consider normative. Whether because disabled people are used to navigating symptoms of the disability itself, accommodating care needs, or dealing with the requirements of accessible transit or other barriers, we disabled people move through time in ways that can be unfamiliar to others. Sometimes we disabled people move slower; sometimes we move faster. (The three-minute pickup window for Para Transpo shocks every able-bodied person I meet.)

 
In her essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” the disability studies scholar Ellen Samuels quotes her friend Alison Kafer, who says, “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”[1] (For more on the personal and academic use of the reclaimed slur “crip,” see Language.) “Crip theory” as an offshoot of and response to queer theory was used first by academics Robert McRuer and Carrie Sandahl; “crip time” as a special category of time was discussed by Samuels, Kafer, and the author of Mad at School, Margaret Price.

Earlier in this section, there are introductions to different ways of accommodating and thinking about crip time. There was the example of moving the Para Transpo booking time (and pretty much everything else presented during that scenario). Another example: consider doing interviews in several sessions if verbal processing, fatigue or other impairments are an issue.

As I mentioned, though, crip time is not always slow. When I first encountered the concept, my first thought was, wow, journalists don’t live in crip time at all, do they? But the longer I’ve worked in the field, the more I have begun to doubt my first impulse. (Doubting your first impulse is good for you. I recommend it to everyone.) The way we journalists go with the flow and follow where the story takes us can sometimes impart a very crip sensibility to our work. The way we work to accommodate the schedules of a journalistic team and the needs of our sources reminds me of moving through crip time. Having been diagnosed with ADHD — and having seen so many other journalists get diagnosed with it or other forms of neurodivergence — I wonder whether many of us are drawn to the field of journalism because it can move quickly, and it offers hard external deadlines we can use to regulate ourselves and our attention. For me, at least, this, too, is part of crip time.

The construction “minority time” is common when discussing cultures that experience marginalization in different ways. In Decolonizing Journalism, Duncan McCue introduces readers to “Indian time[2].” I have participated in events that run on “queer time.”

 
These kinds of conceptualizations tend to have some things in common. Most important for our purposes, they are concepts used by insiders within groups and not used by outsiders, except descriptively. I’m citing McCue’s work for purposes of analogy, and I would keep it in mind when doing reporting in Indigenous communities, but I would not say I’m doing something on “Indian time” myself. I would not suggest that you as a journalist refer to “crip time” in an interview, especially if you do not claim crip or disabled identity yourself. But the concept of “crip time” can be used to think about the different ways in which time moves and shapes disability and vice versa. What might seem to you an “easy, quick in an out” in-person interview might be a very carefully orchestrated, and physically taxing, event that the source pays for over days.

More than anything else, using the framework of crip time can teach journalists and other media professionals how to respect disabled sources’ time in general and in interviews specifically. Assume that disabled people’s time is important and could be used to do something else. Assume that a disabled person giving time to you as a journalist and to media outlets carries a cost for them. Do not assume standard life paths or trajectories, standard working hours or standard anything.