(set: $name to
(prompt: "What is your name?", "Nigel Q. Neuroqueer")
)
(align:"==>")+(box:"X=")[''''////“Crip time is time travel….we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear”////'''' //— Ellen Samuels (2017), “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”//]
Dear ''$name'',
This webtext is a gameful meditation and lament on crip time travel. As we created this narrative, we found ourselves frequently deliberating on the subject of this game — its players, its pathways, its dragons. We lingered on Ellen Samuels’ work, cited here in our epigraph, along with many other interlocutors who think and write on crip time, techno-ableism, and institutional violence.
As you engage this webtext, we invite you to reflect on the following adage: “Things always come due.”
Perhaps you are doing more than reflecting. Perhaps you are reacting. Perhaps this adage has made you worry. Perhaps there is tightness, perspiration, a ricochet of rumination. What is coming due for you?
Choose one:
* [[I am overburdened.->time is not given]]
* [[I am blissfully unaware.->join a committee]]You were diagnosed a while ago. You sit with this knowledge as you contemplate [[what it means to request a disability accommodation at your institution->documentation]]. Do you even know how to request an accommodation, or what accommodations you might need? The questions mount in tandem with your stress levels: There is sweat. There is a tensing of your shoulders. Your heart throttles so vigorously that it might break the sound barrier.
You know that student-serving accessibility offices have a time fetish, much like they have a predilection for certain clinical credentials when it comes to paperwork (they <3 neuropsychologists; social workers, not so much). If your documentation is more than five years old, you might be shit out of luck. You’re trying to remember when you were diagnosed, or if a quick note from your therapist or PCP that says ''my client has Some Issues™'' will suffice.
[[You know that academia is hostile->crip relativity]], that it feeds on stigma. You were diagnosed a while ago. What does your employer care? They value tuition dollars more than they value the safety of immunocompromised people. Your knowledge is scaring you here. You remember reading an employee memo asking for a year’s worth of medical records: This is what might stand between you and a necessary remote teaching or learning accommodation. This is what might stand between you and additional time to complete your degree. Of course, there’s more that stands in your way than this. You know this. (Academic ableism. An understaffed ADA Office. No central funding for accommodations. Inaccessible tech. The fact that you even need to request an accommodation + disclose a bunch of vulnerable personal information rather than working or learning at a place that values crip culture or design justice. Also, there’s a bike that’s always blocking the fucking wheelchair ramp to the library.)
You were diagnosed a while ago. [[All paths lead to languishing.->languishing]]You hope to be diagnosed in the future. Perhaps this is a hope you’ve had for quite some time, or perhaps this is a new hope of yours. You’ve struggled for long enough to know that your needs won’t be met without a diagnosis–that attempts to have them met will be met with skepticism if not outright disbelief. Perhaps you’ve already started at some of the accommodation forms or documentation requirements, in order to get a better idea of what you’ll need in order for your university to consider an accommodation “reasonable.” Perhaps you’re scared to find out.
You’re tired. You know it takes time to receive a diagnosis, and your needs aren’t being met while you wait. Perhaps the prospect of [[jumping through the hoops->documentation]] to receive a diagnosis feels overwhelming to you, when you scarcely have any spoons <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/breakfast-pixel-art" targe="_blank"><img src="img/spoon.png" alt="spoon"></a> left after dealing with everything else. While you know it takes time, you’re not sure how much–it’s hard to know exactly how long it will take to get an appointment, how many doctors and specialists you’ll need to see, how many layers of bureaucracy you’ll need to get “processed” by. It’s hard to plan around something when you don’t know how much time and energy it will take. Not to mention money–hopefully you have insurance, and hopefully there’s a nearby doctor who takes it, and hopefully they don’t charge you too much. Why are they making you wait so long?
There is something we should address before you continue, which is that some diagnoses will be used to claim that you lack the competence to make medical decisions. Perhaps this is something you’ve been familiar with for quite some time; perhaps this is the first you’ve heard of it. This can lead to your being denied healthcare that you need, and can also enable physicians to impose treatments on you that you neither want nor need. The road to diagnosis is long, frustrating, and tiring; who knows if you’ll finish it, and who knows if the accommodations that diagnosis makes possible will be worth all the spoons <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/breakfast-pixel-art" targe="_blank"><img src="img/spoon.png" alt="spoon"></a> it cost in the first place. And you can’t assume you’ll even actually receive those accommodations after a diagnosis, in the first place. With all this in mind: are you sure that you wish to proceed?
Choose one:
* [[Yes; I know my diagnosis won’t be used against me. Or perhaps I know that it can be used against me, and that is a risk that I am willing to take. The chance of having my needs met, of having accommodations provided, is worth it.->Yes, I know my diagnosis won’t be used against me]]
* [[No, I don’t want a diagnosis at this time.->No, I don’t want a diagnosis at this time.]]
* [[I’m not sure if my diagnosis can be used against me?->I’m not sure if my diagnosis can be used against me?]]
* [[I'd like to practice avoidance and pretend for a bit that this diagnosis conversation doesn't exist.->I'd like to practice avoidance]]“This is intrusive, $name,” you think to yourself, confronted with the question of disclosing diagnosis. You know that in order to access accommodations you might need—long-term, short-term, chronic, acute, situational, or otherwise—you need a diagnosis, a signature from the right kind of specialist certifying that the needs you express are indeed real and valid. You know that academia requires this kind of documentation, a paternalistic impulse for a paper trail because they trust neuropsychologists to know what you need more than they trust you to know yourself (though it’s a bit of an ouroboros, when you consider that disclosing a diagnosis will pretty much ensure they’ll trust you to know yourself even less). And then, even when you are willing to be vulnerable, to go through the arduous process of acquiring a diagnosis from the right kind of provider, to disclose those personal details to your institutional employer, the accommodations they offer will be on their terms, often cursory, and depending on your luck, may not even be honored by the people in charge you share them with.
“This is intrusive,” you think. It’s none of the institution’s business whether you have a diagnosis. You know your own bodymind and your needs, and for all the university’s talk of diversity and inclusion, you wish they would listen to you, would discuss the ways the institution could be made more accessible without [[requiring you to cite your medical history->documentation]]. And while you’re conscious of the problems associated with universal design, the way it has the habit of <a href="https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/4632/3946" target="_blank">promoting accessibility checklists rather than processes</a>, the ways it decenters disability, it certainly has its upsides, too. Universal design can help us to identify who institutions are built for. Despite claims that public spaces are meant for everyone, universal design provides processes for revealing quite different and exclusionary spatial realities. Academia is not generally renowned as a space of radical welcoming. $name, think about, for example, how your institution often flaunts the ableist language of brilliance, strength, leadership, and bestness: it’s meant for specific kinds of bodyminds, the hypernormate.
It is intrusive, you contemplate, for institutions to require documented disclosure of disability and therefore a particular kind of diagnosis in order to supposedly meet the needs of their community members. Adopting a universal design paradigm could reduce the need for diagnosis as a construct altogether, inviting in its place conversations between institutional community members ready to support each other, meeting each other’s needs with care instead of skepticism, asking “how can we support your needs together?” instead of “can you prove to me that you really need that?”
“This is intrusive,” you think. All paths lead to [[languishing]]. All paths, anyways, except for the one where you [[join a committee]].
#Time <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/vintage-decor" target="_blank"><img src="img/clock.png" alt="clock"></a> is not given
One of us related this adage — things always come due — in a state of frustration, after describing the challenges of navigating disability accommodation systems and associated techno-ableist barriers during the pandemic. As Alison Kafer (2013) has argued, institutional accommodation models //extend// time rather than //explode// it: Extra time for exams in no way shifts the normative expectations of the exam as an educational construct (p. 27). Adding time to the tenure clock in no way reconceives the structures, precarities, and temporalities of the tenure system. A Zoom recording displaces and extends time rather than protecting it (but also: do you have an accommodation to work via Zoom?).
Through the institution, time merely shifts.
Time is not given.
Accommodations only give time for more accommodations.
Accommodation time is the time of diagnosis, of medical gazes and institutional intrusion.
$name, Where are you located in diagnosis time?
Choose one:
* [[I was diagnosed a while ago.->I was diagnosed a while ago]]
* [[I hope to be diagnosed in the future.->I hope to be diagnosed in the future]]
* [[This is intrusive.->This is intrusive]]Congratulations, ''$name''! You have been invited to serve on the Committee for Disability Issues and Needs Assessment on Accessibility, Universal Design for Learning, and the Handicapable Profession, also known by the helpful non-mnemonic moniker ''CDINAAUDLHP''.
(b4r:"dotted")+(b4r-colour:purple)+(bg:#e5e5e5)[<figure><figcaption>(color:purple)[''Access statement.'' ]CDINAAUDLHP believes in meeting (text-style:"underline")[all] special access needs: our motto is //special needs for special people!// This is why we're including a very special audio pronunciation of our esteemed committee name (sa-deena-ood-ah-loop). </figcaption>
<audio controls src="audio/CDINAAUDLHP.mp3"></figure>]
Do you accept this prestigious invitation to submit untold hours of labor that your department won’t recognize + volunteer yourself as a narrating exhibit of disabled personhood that will be roundly ignored by those who actually just want to help people like you?
[[Yes, I accept->languishing]]
[[No, I do not accept ->we haven't learned lessons]]It’s exciting when you have your shit together. But this seems a far-away feeling during the pandemic. It’s exhausting to pretend.
Your crip time travel powers seem to be of little use when you wish to reach the mythical you that has boundless energy to do mundane tasks like washing your hair or finishing that paper.
How can you find the wherewithal to survive when you’re languishing?
Choose one:
* [[I am sore, literally and metaphorically.->demotivation]]
* [[I have some middle fingers that need to be exercised.->gaming the system]]
There was a lot of talk in the early days of the pandemic about how our impulse to want to “return to normal” was misguided. It seemed like white people were finally listening when Black people said, “Normal is effed up. The systems (of racism, misogyny, ableism, heteronormativity, classism, and on and on) weren’t broken—they were functioning as they were always meant to: keeping the power in the hands of the hypernormate on the backs of everyone else.” And for a while, it kind of felt like change was in the air. People who had never thought about their own axes of privilege were actually listening and doing the critical self-reflective work. Institutions were urging faculty to meet students’ needs with kindness. Classes went remote. Masks were required. Graded classes became pass/fail classes and institutions sent emails and set up committees and services aimed at making courses more accessible.
Then, vaccines were introduced, and we returned to requisite in-person learning. Then, documents intended to support students experiencing the effects of COVID, in particular long COVID, began to emerge. These documents showcase institutional efforts to offer visible, material care for students, yet they are also cast in shadow, and there is the sense that our violent hegemonic systems still reverberate through even the best-intended materials.
Choose one:
* [[What lessons can I carry?->Out of time]]
* [[Can George help me?->steamy docs]]
Yes; I know my diagnosis won’t be used against me. Or perhaps I know that it can be used against me, and that is a risk that I am willing to take. The chance of having my needs met, of having accommodations provided, is worth it.
You begin the process of procuring a diagnosis. You might have to cycle through multiple professionals to receive a diagnosis. You may have to wait months for an appointment. You may need to carefully save up to afford the appointments you make.
* [[The process is overwhelming, and you decide that you will no longer attempt to pursue a diagnosis.->No, I don’t want a diagnosis at this time.]] Perhaps you decided relatively early on in the process, realizing quickly that none of the local doctors take your insurance. Perhaps you give up after having gone through several rounds of appointments, and making no headway. Maybe you’d still like a diagnosis someday, but it’s not happening today.
* [[You get lucky, and receive a diagnosis quickly; or, perhaps you drag yourself through a slog of appointments, and then receive a diagnosis.->you get lucky]]
(set: $adjective to
(prompt: "What adjective best describes the process of seeking a diagnosis?", "ridiculous")
)
You decide not to pursue a diagnosis at this time. You decide, after some thought, that securing a diagnosis would be too costly, or dangerous, or exhausting, or expensive, or (ad nauseam), to you. It is a heavy decision, one that it hurts you to make; the need that brought you to seek a diagnosis hasn’t become any less urgent, after all, and it hurts to turn your back on the possibility of fulfilling it, to realize that it would be too ''$adjective'' to try. You wonder if you will ever have that need met.
Choose one:
* This is exhausting. [[I think I will languish->languishing]].
* I have to work to change the system, to make it more fair and accessible. (How ironic that a system meant to provide access can be so inaccessible). [[But wait–isn’t there a committee for that?->join a committee]]
* I have some spoons to share;; [[how can I make things work (as well as I can) in the meantime?->gaming the system]]
<a href="https://www.aafp.org/afp/2008/0615/p1689.html" target="_blank">''$name'', here’s a link to an article</a> describing how primary care physicians may assess the degree to which you deserve a right to autonomy. Remember that how they make this assessment will be impacted by race, class, gender, immigration status, and perceived health. You might also observe how the authors make determinations about who is “deserving” (scare quotes purposeful) of care and services. Note too their emphasis on the floating signifiers that often attend diagnosis: Severity. Functioning. Capacity.
We suggest steeling yourself for badness, as well as indeterminacy, $name: diagnoses are often weaponized by institutions, state actors, corporations, and the medical-industrial complex, all of which are steeped in the logics of white supremacy. We encourage you to (re)read <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2383/The-Right-to-MaimDebility-Capacity-Disability" target="_blank">Jasbir Puar’s (2017) work on debility, biopolitics, and prognosis time</a>, to spend some time with the <a href="https://notdeadyet.org/" target="_blank">Not Dead Yet website</a>, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2018, 2020) writing on <a href="https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Care-Work" target=_"blank">care work</a> and <a href="https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/24/cripping-the-resistance-no-revolution-without-us/" target="_blank">crip/mad/BIPOC resistance</a>.
Once you read, [[you can return to the previous question->I hope to be diagnosed in the future]]. Alternatively, feel free to skip reading or to save these bookmarks for later, and return anyway.You practice avoidance and pretend for a bit that this diagnosis conversation doesn't exist.
Choose one:
* [[This sounds like an excellent idea. There’s gotta be cute animals somewhere around here, right?->cute animal tax]]
* Regardless, [[all paths eventually lead to languishing.->languishing]]Now that you have a diagnosis, you still need to provide the [[documentation->documentation]] to the university. Perhaps they need you to submit other pieces of paperwork too. It really does take an awful lot of effort to convince someone that you do, in fact, need what you say you need. Not to mention information; you know you will be treated differently, that you will have to deal with new kinds of ableism, once you share your diagnosis with the university.
* I disclose my diagnosis. I really, really need my accommodations. And there’s a chance I’ll get them, as long as I make sure to [[perform->crip relativity]]. This has been an exhausting process; it’s time to [[languish->languishing]].
* [[I change my mind->This is intrusive]]; how dare the university ask me to share something as personal as a diagnosis, for something as fundamental as the accommodation I am asking for. I’ve lost a lot of time, [[so I want to stretch out what I still have->Out of time]].$name, let's talk about crip masquerades and remote learning/working conditions. Phrased differently, how can we get what we need when our institutions are claiming that COVID is over? In turning to the masquerade, we are summoning the work of Tobin Siebers — in particular, Siebers’ (2008) contention that disability “alters the logics” of closeting as we might understand it in queer and feminist contexts. Here, Siebers draws our attention to a crip logic of disclosure, one that highlights how disabled and chronically ill folks might rhetorically vacillate between playing up <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/handheld-gaming-console" targe="_blank"><img src="img/console.png" alt="gaming console"></a>and playing down <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/potion-bottles" targe="_blank"><img src="img/potion.png" alt="potion"></a> one’s non/normativity. As Siebers notes, “When a disabled body moves into any space, it discloses the social body implied by that space” (p. 86). Following Siebers and others, we are thinking intentionally about what a renewed attention to disclosure might bring us during covid times. In this project, we are thinking about disclosure along two axes:
* How do disabled bodyminds disclose the social body implied by virtual learning spaces?
* How do disabled bodyminds portal through/across/beyond universities’ diagnostic timelines?
Put alternatively: How do crips game the system? What does a mad model of bureaucratic gameplay resemble? How might we narrate the inherent badness of this diagnostic, Futurama-level conspiratorial bureaucracy game? And where might we find crip levity amidst the awfulness?
Choose one:
[[I’d like to wear a wrinkled shirt.->wrinkly shirt]]
[[I feel galvanized enough to read about crip theory.->crip theory]]
[[I’d like to do some unauthorized time travel.->Out of time]]
Disability documentation is a wormhole: It devours time and energy and reconstitutes your bodymind over and over and over again. It crushes dermis and dreams. It constantly portals you to new dimensions: Crip bureaucracy is a multiverse.
<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/blackhole-picture" target="_blank"><img src="img/blackhole.png" alt="black hole"></a>
Documenting disability necessitates a textualization of the body: The body becomes evidence. How does that evidence support one’s claims for services, for life-giving care, for housing, for schooling supports, for community?
[[Surveillance >>->surveillance]]
It’s a relatively good day, and relative is the operative word here: Relative to your daily usual, your bodymind is coping! performing! somehow making it through! Relatively, anyway. How, then, are you to convince your healthcare provider, much less your university, that you need access to accommodations or services? How might you perform-disclose-position your bodymind in a way that’s legible to bureaucrats?
You know that disability, disclosure, and masking are not new conversations. Many elders have come before you. As you’re thinking about your bodymind’s legibility, you’re feeling a knot in your stomach. This legibility metaphor inscribes how your bodymind is understood: as an object, as a pincushion, as a specimen, or as some kind of pathological recipe that is going to be read, microwaved, and probed over and over and over again.
How does one [[play within the system->gaming the system]] on a good day?We are in a post-pandemic world, or so we have been told; mask mandates have been lifted, in most areas; the majority of classes are now being taught in person again. The scene, quite possibly, fills you with dread–perhaps you are immunocompromised, or living with someone who is immunocompromised, or living with someone who cannot yet be vaccinated. Perhaps you are worried for your students. In any case, $name, you feel out of sync with everyone who is moving on, or trying to move on, out of time in more than one sense. The readiness to move past entails a readiness to leave behind.
<a href="https://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2020/08/02/how-to-teach-with-text-platforming-down-as-disability-pedagogy/" target="_blank">In their article “Platforming Down,” Friedner, Sanchez, and Mills</a> make the point that, in online classes, most instructors seek to replicate the in-person classroom, as closely as possible, in how they construct their online classrooms. As the “new normal” turns into “back to normal” and discussion on how to create a “normal classroom” virtually shifts to emphasizing a return to the in-person classrooms that had always been presumed as “normal,” “Platforming Down” serves as a potent reminder of how staying remote can be something other than a last-resort option—of how it can be generative and desirable in its own right.
Choose one:
* [[George the Disability Documentation Dragon would like to know why you’re teaching classes remotely.->teaching remotely]]
* [[I’m going to blow off George.->Let’s think about something else for awhile.]]
<img src="img/loki.png" alt="loki"><img src="img/ophelia.png" alt="ophelia">
''Image descriptions: ''
Loki, a blonde shih tzu puppy
Ophelia, a black cat with a white belly
[[All paths lead to languishing.->languishing]]
[[Oh look! More committee members! ->join a committee]] Here we are temporarily darting away from the second person to allow you, our myriad readers, some time to languish. In giving you space to languish, we do not mean to suggest that languishing is a positive thing. Instead, we want to expand and unmoor the demotivating meanings of the term. We expect that as you read or listen to this, you might feel blah. You might be sitting in an office chair and feeling tension roll across your body. You might be lying on your couch, floor, or bed, feeling the effects of sleeplessness or depression. You might be wearing earbuds and craning your neck on the bus. Your hip might be throbbing in pain. Maybe you just ate a donut (at least one of us writing has) to help distract you from overwhelming despair. It’s possible you might feel good (and we don’t want to discount that!) — but as we write to you, our hopeful collaborators and co-conspirators, we want you to know that we, too, are languishing.
As we work/ed on this hypertext narrative, we have been drawing upon work in disability justice, and we are notably indebted to the work of BIPOC and queer/trans organizers, scholars, artists, and technologists. Lately, we’ve been thinking about Imani Barbarin’s (2020) contention that “We cannot afford normal.” As Barbarin describes,
<blockquote>‘Normal’ was a lie meant to pacify us and discourage challenging a society built around racism, ableism and white supremacy. Because of these systems, disabled people and communities of color have been devastated all while simultaneously experiencing systemic racism and police violence. And you want normal? (n.p.)</blockquote>
Following Barbarin, we are dwelling on what ‘normal’ signals within institutional contexts built upon eugenic aims: [[Exclusion->crip theory]]. Debilitation. [[Death->surveillance]].
What would you like to do?
* [[I would like to practice some avoidance right now and look at pictures of pets; I am languishing, after all.->cute animal tax]]
* [[I need some time to sit with my bad feelings.->join a committee]]
* [[I want to explore some alternatives to 'normal.'->crip relativity]]
Our versioning of crip games and techno-bureaucratic rhetoric are interlinked: They point to the continual re/construction of disability as it comes into being through exclusionary practices in remote and physical classrooms as well as through the exclusionary politics of diagnostic assessment. The temporal logics of semesters and demands on productivity are fundamentally out of sync with the conditions of crip and mad living. Here we turn to Margaret Price’s (2021) theorizing of crip spacetime as a way of thinking through the complexities of disclosure as they intermingle with accommodationist bureaucracy and embodied performances of diagnosis. Key to Price’s thinking about crip temporalities are the harms, traumas, and intersecting oppressions (racism, transantagonism, classism, adjunctification) that structure how precarious bodyminds move through institutional time and space. As Price notes, “academic time... is composed not only of a fast-moving, bell-ringing present but also of histories of inequality and abuse, as well as uncertain futures that could point toward either transformation or further eugenic projects” (p. 263). As Price identifies here and throughout, time has great potential to harm.
As we dwell on Price’s invocation that time harms, we are constantly reminded of how accommodationist systems [[enforce specific, codified displays->wrinkly shirt]] of disability in their pseudo-diagnostic assessments of what and who counts as disabled enough.
Indeed, rhetorical constructs of embodyminded performance and disability are inseparable from one another. Here we draw upon Christina Cedillo’s (2018) call to “understand the embodied I/me as a strategic site of invention that moves in and about the world,” a call to think complexly about non-normativity as a means for disrupting and ultimately transforming institutional structures via the [[cunning potentials->scents]] of disabled, raced, and gendered action.
Choose one:
[[Necropolitics, race, and long covid->necropolitics]]
[[Halp?->we haven't learned lessons]]
When we began working on this project, the three of us were drifting (and struggling) through the crip bureaucracy wormhole. The influx of popular discourse on COVID threw into relief what activists and scholars have long foretold about surveillance and its disproportionate impacts on those who are BIPOC, crip/mad, trans, queer, poor, and undocumented. Institutional medico-bureaucracies are sustained by ecologies of tracking and marking: Documenting disability isn’t merely an institutional declaration about how one’s bodymind should be bureaucratically categorized. [[It is also a means through which a host of university offices and administrators can surveil — watch, collect, track, violate.->This is intrusive]]
Simone Browne’s (2015) work on surveillance is particularly resonant here. Speaking to prototypical whiteness as a “cultural and technological logic that informs many instances of the practices of biometrics,” Browne highlights how slavery and attendant anti-Black constructions of capture are antecedent to biometric surveillance technologies (p. 110). As we think about how race, gender, and disability are mutually imbricated, we might call to mind some of the technologized clinical violences that COVID discourse has renewed and revisited: <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2029240" target="_blank">pulse oximeters and racial bias</a>; <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771111" target="_blank">medical gaslighting</a> and the perennial problems of believability tied to race and gender; <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00118-0/fulltext" target="_blank">care rationing</a>; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/09/22/professors-covid-masks-college-protest/" target="_blank">institutional expendability of the most vulnerable</a>.
Choose one:
[[Verify me->identification]]
[[Dismiss me->dismissal]]
It’s time to be assessed. Maybe you’re heading to a clinician’s office. Maybe you’re heading to a meeting with HR. Maybe you’ve got an appointment with your university’s disability services office. Or maybe you need to have a conversation with your chair, supervisor, or professor. Regardless of the “who” in this scenario, you’re being assessed, and you’re feeling compelled to demonstrate your disabledness.
As you prep your crip couture, you bring to mind some nuggets of crip wisdom, shared by Ellen Samuels (2014): “when applying for benefits or accommodations of any kind, it is best to appear ill-groomed, unattractive, and generally impoverished” (p. 136).
On goes the wrinkled shirt!
<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/character-portrait-kit" target="_blank"><img src="img/shirt.png" alt="wrinkled green shirt"></a>
Choose one:
[[Crip level up: Eat some garlic->scents]]
[[Crip level down: Eat some garlic->scents]]
[[There is no winning->we haven't learned lessons]]
#The scents and scenes of assessment
<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/food-pack-cooking" target="_blank"><img src="img/food.png" alt="green pepper, garlic, tomato, onion"></a>
Maybe you can eat FODMAPS. Or maybe FODMAPS will fuck you up. Whether your decisions involve garlic or Prozac or mobility aids or how/when/whether to sleep, you’re continually confronted with impossible choices: Will you be believed? Will unkind foods enhance your crip/mad ethos during an assessment intake? If you vomit on your healthcare provider, will you crip-level up or down? Does garlic spell life or death? <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/evil-garlic-and-heart-oga-summer-jam-2021" target="_blank"><img src="img/garlic.png" alt="three cloves of evil garlic"></a>
[[Take me away from the garlic->crip theory]]
[[I am bracing myself to read about death and violence->necropolitics]]
Long COVID is both new and not new. It is new in the most literal sense: a virus that had never existed before 2019. It is new because we could not predict its patterns, because we had no idea whose lives it would steal and how it would tear through the world, turning mundanity upside down in ways that have been in turn menacing and productive. But it is also not new at all. The patterns the pandemic has revealed are very old: the virus has thrown into sharp relief the necropolitics disabled folks have been drawing attention to for ages, that power ultimately manifests in the “capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (Mbembé, 2003, p. 11).
We understand this, that Long COVID is just a new manifestation of a perpetual injustice; the committee that wrote the Long COVID Workbook (2021) invokes this point, too, though their focus is on a lack of documentation for students coming through disability services offices rather than on [[the violence this documentation perpetuates->documentation]]. Still, they historicize the growing population of students seeking the support of disability services offices, comparing them to students displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the vast majority of whom were Black, seeking support without documents and diagnoses (p. 13). As the workbook authors note, this is nothing new. Depriving BIPOC and disabled students of needed support via appeals to bureaucracy is nothing new. That university administrators don’t seem to care at all if their students find their classes accessible, if they, along with faculty and staff, feel safe is nothing new.
As it stands, universities are not taking responsibility for their part in Long COVID. They won’t acknowledge that they have created disability, both through the bureaucratic structures that socially construct disability, and also through their swift and forced return to in-person teaching and learning, which contributed to the continued spread of the mutating, uncontrolled virus through campus communities all across the country. Universities are the reason so many students are now experiencing Long COVID, and universities are the reason they are unable to access their coursework and classrooms in the ways they need to now that they have Long COVID. Institutions don’t care who lives and who dies. They demonstrate their devaluing of the lives of immunocompromised people, people living with vulnerable people, and truly everyone else, as this unpredictable virus has rampaged across the world, taking the old and the young, the immunocompromised and immunocompetent. University of Michigan lecturer Lisa Steichmann <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/09/22/professors-covid-masks-college-protest/" target="_blank">shared her story with the Washington Post</a> in the fall:
<blockquote>In between teaching two of her classes, Lisa Steichmann got an ultrasound to check whether cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. After losing four organs to the disease in the past decade, she was relieved by the results. But it was only the first of a series of high-stakes tests on her mind: She scheduled 12 coronavirus tests, one each week this semester. Despite her requests and a doctor’s note warning of the specific danger the disease poses for her, she had not gotten permission to teach fully remotely when classes started this fall, she said.</blockquote>
Here is where our [[gameful meditation->Out of time]] effects a critique of the workbook: Rather than resisting the systems of oppression universities inhabit and uphold, the Long COVID Workbook seeks to accommodate, to shift responsibility from structures to students and faculty struggling to navigate the systems while staying alive. Countless university community members, like Steichmann, were forced to risk their lives on campus: the choice the university gave them was to either come to campus and risk their lives or to leave their jobs or programs, to lose their educational progress, their access to the degree they were earning, the insurance benefits they had accrued, and the paychecks they relied on to live.
Choose one:
[[Throw me down a wormhole->documentation]]
[[Send me to the future->we haven't learned lessons]]
Both Simone Browne (2015) and Ellen Samuels (2014) emphasize that verification imposes a dual logic on vulnerable subjects: identification and dismissal. On its surface, verification seemingly functions merely as a rhetoric of identification, wherein certain bodyminds are coded as deviant. Browne in particular highlights how techno-clinical branding discourses are the culmination of a longer history, a history marked by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, wherein Black subjects are tortured, branded, tracked, and traded as property. Imploring readers to question how “our biometric past… can allow us to think critically about our biometric present,” Browne demonstrates how technologies of verification (e.g., facial recognition, DNA testing, pulse oximetry, and so on) are structured to presume whiteness as normative (p. 91).
As we center covid discourse in this project — more specifically, long covid — we find it important to foreground how race, gender, and class are deeply enmeshed in medico-bureaucratic processes of identification. Put simply, this is not just a question of who is being believed, but the ways in which racialized bodyminds are coded: prodded, probed, dehumanized, reconstituted—viscerally and literally.
Choose one:
[[Dismiss me->dismissal]]
[[Have you joined a committee yet?->join a committee]]
Verification relies on an inherent logic of dismissal. Ellen Samuels (2014) describes this as a “kind of bodily/textual dissonance, in which [disabled people’s] experiences are displaced and superseded by a written authentication that palimpsestically overwrites their own bodily knowledge” ( p. 121). Indeed, [[even if one successfully receives a needed diagnosis->I was diagnosed a while ago]], one’s needs (including life-sustaining needs) are not guaranteed to be met. Enter the bureaucracy, the game, the crip vortex — the system that determines, via re-re-re-re-re-assessment, whether you actually need anything that you say you need, $name.
Choose one:
[[I’d like to feed the dragon->feed the dragon]]
[[I’d like to look at photos of puppies and kittens->cute animal tax]]
<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/dragon-9" target="_blank"><img src="img/dragon.gif" alt="dragon"></a>
Feed me your paperwork, $name! For I am George, the Disability Documentation Dragon!
Choose one:
* [[I have been scathed <img src="img/fire.gif" alt="fire"> by George->steamy docs]]
* [[I have been scratched by George->George wants to know how you feel]]
* [[I am bothered by the use of passive voice in the above options->Out of time]]
<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/fire-0" target="_blank"><img src="img/fire.gif" alt="fire"></a><a href="https://opengameart.org/content/fire-0" target="_blank"><img src="img/fire.gif" alt="fire"></a><a href="https://opengameart.org/content/fire-0" target="_blank"><img src="img/fire.gif" alt="fire"></a>
Your mind is ablaze as you rifle through the forms given to you by [[George, the Disability Documentation Dragon->feed the dragon]]. The forms inquire about your “functional limitations,” as well as whether you have been a “compliant” patient. One document includes a never-ending verification checklist that needs to be completed by your healthcare provider, ranking your impairments across a variety of activities. These activities range across seeing, hearing, caring for yourself, breathing, sitting, eating, speaking, and learning.
But these forms alone are not enough evidence of your crip/mad bodymind: The documents request test results, possibly medical records, and up to a year’s worth. One of the forms, you notice, is a generic-looking Google Form, with no information about where it goes once you hit submit. Who has access to this information, you wonder? How will your medical information travel across campus offices as assessment and accommodations are thrown into motion?
Choose one:
* [[George, plz, I need to teach/learn online.->teaching remotely]]
* [[Why is George violating my privacy?->privacy and pain]]
* [[George, how do you plan to implement accommodations for long covid?->long covid]]
(set: $feeling to
(prompt: "How are you feeling? Use an adjective to describe your current state.", "shitty")
)
<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/dragon-9" target="_blank"><img src="img/dragon.gif" alt="dragon"></a>
''“How are you feeling?”''
George the Disability Documentation Dragon asks you this question, and you’re not sure how you actually feel, much less how you’re supposed to feel.
The question is many things at once: It’s ambiguous. It’s passive-aggressive. It’s maybe caring, or a version of caring? It’s seemingly after something specific, as though there’s one right answer that you just don’t have access to. You call to mind the pain scales used in medical settings: Are you a 7 in feeling? Is that even a thing?
$name, you said that you feel $feeling. What else do you notice about your bodymind, your pain or anxiety levels, the space around you, the feel of objects and clothing and air as they press against your skin?
[[How are you feeling?->how are you feeling?]]
<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/dragon-9" target="_blank"><img src="img/dragon.gif" alt="dragon"></a>
''"Why are you teaching classes remotely?" asks George the Disability Documentation Dragon.''
That remote learning can be generative is something that universities have acknowledged, even as they pressed for a return to in-person instruction. At our university, however, fully online instruction has been a rarity since the residential return: instructors were provided with the option of teaching a course of blended design (where no more than ⅓ of course meetings take place online) as long as the use of online course meetings is “pedagogically motivated.”
We imagine that this rhetoric of pedagogical motivation is a familiar rhetoric, a rhetoric not limited to our institution. One wonders why the pedagogical motivation of teaching in-person isn’t similarly scrutinized; one also wonders if the health and safety of the instructor, the students, and the people they live with counts as a “pedagogical motivation.” On that note, it is telling that a course following a blended format to the specifications of the university must have its online meetings planned out at the start. Such a format, of course, cannot and is not meant to be responsive to the students and instructors whose ability to enter the in-person classroom varies on a week-to-week basis. Accommodation and flexibility is not the goal.
Of course, the blended course format is even less accommodating of those who cannot (or would prefer not to; if a student finds coming to in-person classes to be an ordeal, and would be more energized in an online setting, would it not be pedagogical to follow their preferences?) attend in-person class meetings at all. Here, too, one finds the limits of the university’s willingness to acknowledge the pedagogical utility of online teaching–most instructors do not have the option to make a class fully online for pedagogical purposes. These exceptions, as they’re so typically framed, have been rare. At our university, remote teaching exceptions can be made for “minicourses” as well as courses designed to be attended by over 150 students.
On its surface, our institution, like others, has expressed a willingness to make exceptions for instructors who have disability accommodations, or who can’t access the in-person classroom due to a variety of other (mostly unnamed) factors. Of course, you’re out of luck if your disability isn’t documented, if you wish not to disclose, if you are worried for the safety of those you live with rather than for your own, if you are a student looking to take a class rather than an instructor looking to set one up. Moreover, [[as we noted earlier->identification]], documentation unto itself does not guarantee an accommodation, much less reach the arbitrary (and often unnamed) thresholds for severity that universities have set for remote work and learning: [[These are necropolitical machinations->necropolitics]].
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/09/22/professors-covid-masks-college-protest/" target="_blank">You wonder sometimes, as you navigate the bureaucracy, whether the administration realizes or cares that a person waiting for an accommodation is often a person being forced to risk their life.</a>
Choose one:
* [[George has devoured all my energy.->languishing]]
* [[George thinks he has devoured all my energy. I still have a bit.->with what spoons you have]]
* [[I’ve heard that I can get George to back off by feeding him paperwork.->documentation]]
<blockquote>Is there pain associated with your symptoms? In what part of your body are you feeling discomfort? Is the pain consistent, or does it vary across the day? Has the pain gotten better or worse since you first became aware of it? (A lot of the damage from virus initiated conditions like long COVID, comes with a pretty significant amount of peripheral nerve damage and there can be pretty intense pain that goes along with that. I don't have to tell you that pain is exhausting.)
— intake interview excerpt from <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/media/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target="_blank">Supporting Students with Long COVID</a>, p. 20</blockquote>
Disability services staff are responsible for advocating for students’ access needs. They are liaisons between students and instructors, between students and institutional hurdles like deadlines and other standardized requirements for navigating the education system. While their qualifications, backgrounds, and roles vary wildly, they are not healthcare providers, medical professionals, or licensed therapists. So these questions, which ask students to disclose personal, private information about their bodies to staff members whose role is not to assess or diagnose but to advocate for access, are alarming. The possible consequences range from the potential for confusing students into thinking disability services staff are indeed healthcare providers, to the possibility of students’ private medical information being circulated across university personnel, to the trauma of revisiting harrowing events with someone who is not trained, prepared, or qualified to provide care or counsel. This is not even considering the pressure to disclose personal details because of the student-staff power dynamics.
Choose one:
* [[It’s time to visit George.->George wants to know how you feel]]
* [[Who’s George?->feed the dragon]]
How does one document something that can’t be documented? How does one claim disability against a tide of skepticism? In reducing one’s bodymind to evidence, institutions assume that disability only exists in terms of verifiability, obviousness, transparency — one’s so-called incapacities must be documentable according to the terms of both medical science and intricate HR classifications.
Long covid is frequently invoked as an example of this so-called documentation problem, as if the clinical fungibility of long covid bodyminds is the actual problem (rather than, say, oppressive infrastructures, austerity measures, or necropolitics).
"<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/media/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target=_blank">Supporting Students with Long COVID In Higher Education</a>,” a workbook generated by a task force comprising disability service providers across the U.S., was created specifically within this exigence (Long COVID Task Force, 2021). College students with long covid may need accommodations; however, given the recent emergence of long covid as an embodied phenomenon, students with long covid will not have access to consistent documentation or even diagnosis to support those accommodation needs.
As you work through the links and nodes that follow, the stakes of crip time travel and the accommodation game, we hope, will become more palpable, more concrete, more visceral, if they aren’t already. We offer commentary on this workbook in the spirit of identifying how accommodationist logics and attendant techno-medical enterprises work to not only constrain what our colleagues in disability services offices can actually do — these logics also ensnare multiply marginalized community members in a never-ending game of provability.
We also want to note, too, that as we engage the contents of the Long COVID workbook, we recognize the immense labor undertaken by those who created it, as well as their institutional constraints in authoring it: While disability services offices work within the contours of the ADA and other state and federal laws, they also work within the policies set by their home institutions. In other words, their labor offers an informal guide for a version of [[gaming //within// one’s system->crip relativity]], which can prove strategically useful at certain times. But we also want to extend and think beyond this workbook, to highlight how and why accommodationist approaches can only get us so far, how they contort us into situations that risk life-death-livelihood: Accommodations and their surveillatory functions are a [[self-collapsing vortex->documentation]].
A chronology of anxieties:
* [[Distrust->distrust]]
* [[Pseudo neutrality->pseudo neutrality]]
* [[Intake ->intake]]
* [[Privacy and pain->privacy and pain]]
* [[Feelings->how are you feeling?]]
* [[Assumptions->assumptions]]
* [[Encroachment->encroachment]] In “<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/media/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target="_blank">In the Long COVID Workbook</a> (2021), the task force authors historicize the COVID-era’s difficult-to-document access needs by reflecting on displaced students in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:
<blockquote>In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, students with disabilities were shifted to college campuses across the country with NO documentation of their disability, NO likelihood of being able to get documentation, and who brought only their own self-report of their disability and their need for accommodation. That experience seems to mirror what we are facing today with Long COVID – bewildered students who may show up at the disability services office with no documentation of the impact of their Long COVID, and no clear understanding of what WE need to know so that we can help them. (p. 13)</blockquote>
The language here illuminates a problem: Institutions are still hesitant to trust their students to know and express their own needs. This distrust lives in the requirement of documentation, the paperwork disability services offices have determined certifies students as genuinely deserving of the access needs they express. It lives in the capitalization of “NO documentation” and “NO likelihood of…documentation,” in the dismissiveness of “only their own self-report of their disability and their need for accommodation” (p. 13). The committee frames students as “bewildered,” having “no clear understanding of what WE need to know so that we can help them” (p. 13).
However, students, feeling this distrust, feeling the undercurrents of entitlement and helperism, may actually feel stressed, anxious, and exhausted. They may have no idea how to communicate their needs with institutional bodies in such a way that the institution will listen, much less believe them or agree to create the changes they ask for. And if students are indeed “bewildered” and could use some space for self-reflection, to get to know their shifting needs and bodyminds, they need their institutions to create space for learning what accommodations they might need or even what’s possible within the realm of imagination. This may be true for students who can present the requisite documentation and especially for those who cannot. No matter how experienced or inexperienced students are in navigating the red tape of disability services offices, they will feel this distrust.
Choose one:
* [[I would like to read more about the workbook.->pseudo neutrality]]
* [[Anything but looking at the workbook (possibly again).->This is intrusive]]
At the bottom of each section of the [[Long Covid Workbook->long covid]] sits a bolded box intended to summarize the main ideas into a brief list of considerations (Long COVID Task Force, 2021). Following the section “The Documentation Dilemma,” this box appears (p. 53):
<img src="img/workbook.png" alt="Things to Consider... 1. What kind of information will you look for in order to determine a student's legitimate need for specific accommodations? Will you want third party documentation, or do you think you will rely heavily on student self-report through the intake interview? 2. Looking at your answer to (1), consider the demographics of the student population at your institution. Will all students have equal access to the level of documentation you are seeking? 3. How will you handle requests from students who have either no documentation, or documentation that is inconclusive?">
The committee’s work to remain “neutral” in representing these possibilities ends up flattening the implications of the different options they list, for example, in consideration #1. Phrasing such as “legitimate need” raises questions of who has the power to determine the legitimacy of a student’s expressed access needs? It doesn’t begin to unpack the [[racialized, gendered, and classed implications of requiring third party documentation->necropolitics]], and especially the ways questions of ethics and positionality emerge. The workbook invites some reflection on demographics and equal access in the second consideration, but it also urges reliance on generalizations and stereotypes. There is unlikely to be a direct relationship between demographic information and documentation access, and this line of thinking only reinforces the notion that documentation legitimizes, and that documentation should be the goal wherever feasible.
Choose one:
* [[I enjoy reading medical intake forms, xoxo->intake]]
* [[I need to talk to George, the Disability Documentation Dragon.->teaching remotely]]
The following questions are excerpted from the 13-page question bank in the workbook, which the task force introduces as questions intended for an intake interview, a collection of questions readers can choose from, the choice of which “will be highly dependent on your purpose in asking them” (Long COVID Task Force, 2021, p. 16). The question categories center the question, “How Has COVID Impacted the Student’s Life?” and range from Experience with COVID to Academic Questions to queries about physiological symptoms (p. 16).
The number of questions reflects the committee’s generosity in crafting a broad range of possibilities and inviting guide users to choose the questions most relevant for their students and contexts. However, there are a number of questions that, given the context of use and exigence, are intrusive, unnecessary, and frankly grossly inappropriate.
Choose one:
* [[Is your pain consistent?->privacy and pain]]
* [[Are you out of time?->Out of time]]
<blockquote>“How does all of this make you feel? (This would be my way of getting at any mental health concerns… I am not a licensed therapist, but I am a super good listener and very good at referring when this sort of question gets a response outside my wheelhouse)”
— intake interview excerpt, <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/media/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target="_blank">Supporting Students with Long COVID</a>, p. 17</blockquote>
While a question like “How are you feeling?” has the potential to be fairly innocuous and kind, the way the parenthetical frames the question is disconcerting. This passage from the Long COVID Workbook variously positions the staff member as someone who can and should suss out “mental health concerns,” as a friend (a “super good listener”), and as a liaison (“very good at referring”). Disability services staff should be able to connect students with specific resources without interrogating them to share the details of their health, medical care, and experiences surrounding potentially traumatic events. It is worth noting that there is a gentleness to this question, and the care the writer feels for their students can be felt. This care, however, is misguided: it is bureaucratic care rather than radical care or community care. This bureaucratic care is premised on surveillance and suspicion, wherein the disability services staff person dons a terministic screen of psychiatrization. Is there ever a right way for a student to answer “How do you feel?” when university personnel wield lay psychology as their hermeneutic?
Choose one:
* [[There are some assumptions happening here.->assumptions]]
* [[I’d like to self-accommodate, kthxbye.->with what spoons you have]]
<blockquote>Other Considerations for Certain Populations
* Be mindful that some students who come from low-income families or live in medically underserved areas may have less access to medical care and may not have received any treatment for Long-COVID and may lack supporting documentation.
* Be mindful that any questions surrounding the history of COVID are framed in an informative sense, rather than a judgmental sense. For example: We want to know when they first noticed symptoms to compare their symptoms from the beginning until now. We don’t necessarily need to know how they got COVID. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter if they got COVID safe at home or at a crowded concert.
— intake interview excerpt, <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/media/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target="_blank">Supporting Students with Long COVID</a>, p. 17</blockquote>
While the committee offers the concessions that staff should be mindful of students’ backgrounds and that they should invite information without judgment, the questions are still deeply misguided. The encouragement to “Be mindful that some cultures emphasize high-expectations and working hard; some students may feel like they are failing by asking for help/accommodations” seems like it could easily encourage stereotyping and racist and classist assumptions.
Choose one:
* [[Tell us about your confidential medical history.->encroachment]]
* [[I’m languishing again.->languishing]]
You can’t simply ignore university expectations, but there are things you can do without needing their backing. In practice, in-person class meetings might be able to switch to a hybrid mode whenever a student cannot attend in-person. If your superiors are obliging and your students are flexible, perhaps you even make some (or all) of your meetings online. In the absence of institutional support, you do what you can. Going hybrid is difficult when it isn’t officially sanctioned, though; it requires technological support, and you cannot supply it all on your own. Microphones, speakers, cameras–and not just the ones you have on your laptop. Still, you try to work out something ad-hoc. Perhaps you open an online meeting on your laptop so that students can “zoom into” the in-person classroom. Perhaps you place this laptop on one of the desks in the discussion circle, so that remote students can feel included. Or perhaps, sometimes, you are the one who is “zooming in.”
Such experiences are usually frustrating–what you or others can discern from the in-person classroom is fuzzy and difficult to parse out; at least half the words are simply inaudible, and the auto-captioning function isn’t picking them up either. If you have a CART provider or interpreter, the resulting communication might be partial at best. At some point, you notice that your zoom students are almost never speaking, which is hardly surprising. It’s hard to find a time to speak when you are on Zoom and the main course modality is in-person; in the rare moments when you can actually follow a conversation, you have to make sense of the bits of speech that you or a provider could make out. You also need to have something to say, but may come off mute, or awkwardly try to read body language at an odd angle (to make sure you’re not going to cut anyone off), or get someone’s attention, before you can speak. Timeliness can hardly be expected; yet it’s necessary, in order to engage with an in-person class meeting at all.
Choose one:
* [[I still have spoons, or possibly one singular spoon.->This is fine! Everything is fine!!]]
* [[I’ve run out.->languishing]]
<blockquote>Did you receive any formal treatment from a healthcare provider? (hospitalizations, ventilator, other) (p. 20, <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/media/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target="_blank">Supporting Students with Long COVID</a>)</blockquote>
There is no reason why an educational institution, and in particular an office whose responsibility is to advocate for students’ access needs, has any need or right to know the details of their medical experience. There is no need nor right to know whether a student was hospitalized or not, ventilated or not, medicated or not. All that matters is the student’s current needs, to ensure they have the support they need to access their academic classrooms, content, and responsibilities.
Choose one:
* This is exhausting. [[There is nowhere to go but languishing.->languishing]]
* This is exhausting. There is nowhere to go but languishing, [[but first let’s think about failure.->we haven't learned lessons]]
* [[I’m fine! I’m totally fine! Don’t ask me what my definition of ‘fine’ is, please.->Out of time]]
* Be the change you want to see in the world! [[Join a committee!->join a committee]]
What are the possibilities when we don’t try to imitate in-person learning in our remote pedagogy, $name? For now, let’s say that you do have the latitude to make a class that is entirely remote (or perhaps you don’t have that latitude, but you do so anyways). How might such a class center the needs and learning of the students so often relegated to “accommodation”? How might it center the teaching needs of you, the instructor?
To start, neither you nor your students would need to be officially granted an accommodation to join class from bed, or to read a transcription (whether auto-generated or human-generated), and both of you have more agency over how, when, and if you disclose your disability. Perhaps you set up an ongoing chatroom for your class (which isn’t the zoom “Chat” function), which you routinely incorporate into the vocal conversation; or perhaps you ask a rotating cast of students to help you as chat monitor, if you find your attention overwhelmed. Perhaps you set up an email chain while you’re at it: it’s good for everyone to have multiple ways to engage, especially when you know that students might need/want to engage outside of the designated class meeting time.
You notice pretty quickly is how time passes differently when asynchrony does not necessarily mean being out of sync. Multimodality splinters time; where time continues to pass in the vocal conversation, the concurrent text conversation can linger on something that we’ve “moved past.” It can become stuck, slow down, or go in a different direction entirely. It also facilitates time travel: you find that you can travel back in time and pick up on a conversation that “took place” a week ago. It is never too late to say what you want to say; you can take the time you need to organize your thoughts, work up the nerve to hit send. Your thoughts can be fully formed and carefully articulated, or freeform, speculative, and even tangential. You have the time to compose the former. The fact that you can send a message without becoming the center of attention, without filling up the time of those around you, takes the pressure off of doing the latter, relieves those of us who aren’t used to thinking that their thoughts matter and are worth listening to. You make space, but also time, for the tired student, the nonverbal student, the student reading the captions, the student who doesn’t move in sync with the voiced conversation. And the spoken conversation changes too, does its own time travel, doubling back in time to converse with some text, moving at speed while remaining in the past, fast and slow at the same time.
This, we might note, is but one kind of remote classroom. It is far from perfect. Having so many modes active at once can be overwhelming for you or your students. Some kinds of asynchrony are privileged over others. As always, it extends time, rather than giving it. Our hope is that you nevertheless find it useful for thinking about how you find ways to travel through time, to game the system for yourself and your students.
Choose one:
[[My institution won’t let me teach a fully online course.->languishing]]
[[My institution needs me to provide documentation.->documentation]]
[[My institution is very interested in hearing my input.->join a committee]]
Perhaps you try to build in some time that is for the remote students and the remote students only, pausing the in-person classroom and asking if anyone on Zoom would like to add something to the conversation (you’re lucky if anyone answers the call). That’s when you remember to do it, anyways; it’s hard to pay attention to so many different things at once, and it feels somewhat like you’re teaching two classes simultaneously. At which point it is worth asking: why are we doing all this?
Why, when the university must know that some students will need to be remote for the entire semester? The assumption seems to be that in-person classrooms are most productive to learning and that remote and asynchronous pedagogy should strive for proximity and resemblance to the in-person classroom; how else to explain the belief that zooming into an in-person classroom is necessarily better than attending one that’s entirely online, the belief that students are somehow served by the curtailing of courses that are taught entirely online? And what is the purpose, anyways, of mandating in-person/blended classes if instructors aren’t provided with the technology to make hybrid teaching work?
Choose one:
* [[I’d like to hit the undo button.->rewind]]
* [[I’d like to hit the undo button a lot of times.->gaming the system]]
If “zooming in” seems to be failing as a way to accommodate the students attending remotely, then perhaps you opt for a different, more asynchronous approach. You record your class meetings (you let your students know that they can skip the portion of time dedicated to discussion), you upload them along with some of your notes, and you ask your remote students to engage with one another on a text-based platform. In many ways, this is an improvement— remote students are participating more, and they aren’t being forced to sit through a discussion that is barely discernible to them. Students can think and respond at their own pace, rather than forcing themselves to stay in sync with a classroom they aren’t even fully in. Yet on some level, this still doesn’t sit well with you.
This is a course designed around an in-person classroom, rather than a remote or asynchronous one. And as much as the steps you have taken were necessary to provide your remote students with access to some kind of education, their learning is hardly the same as, or even equivalent to, the learning of the students attending your class in-person. But what options do you have, other than bolt-on access, when the university expects you to teach in person and you don’t have the latitude to ignore those expectations? You briefly contemplate formatting the asynchronous portion of the class in such a way that it functions as a complete curriculum without the in-person teaching, before realizing that doing so would be tantamount to teaching two classes while being given time for one, and just thinking about what you would have to do–how much time and spoons <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/breakfast-pixel-art" target="_blank"><img src="img/spoon.png" alt="spoon"></a> you’d need to pull out of thin air–makes you feel exhausted. All paths, of course, lead to [[languishing]].
Choose one:
[[Nope. I’m going to go ahead and mash that undo button..->Let’s think about something else for awhile.]]
[[Maybe it’s time to go pet a puppy.->cute animal tax]]
#References
Barbarin, Imani. (2020, July 26). How to properly celebrate a civil rights law during a pandemic in which its subjects were left to die: The Americans With Disabilities Act. <cite>Crutches and Spice</cite>. <a href="https://crutchesandspice.com/2020/07/26/how-to-properly-celebrate-a-civil-rights-law-during-a-pandemic-in-which-its-subjects-were-left-to-die-the-americans-with-disabilities-act/" target="_blank">https://crutchesandspice.com/2020/07/26/how-to-properly-celebrate-a-civil-rights-law-during-a-pandemic-in-which-its-subjects-were-left-to-die-the-americans-with-disabilities-act/</a>
Browne, Simone. (2015). <cite>Dark matters: On the surveillance of Blackness</cite>. Duke University Press.
Cedillo, Christina V. (2018). What does it mean to move? Race, disability, and critical embodiment pedagogy. <cite>Composition Forum</cite>, //39//. <a href="https://compositionforum.com/issue/39/to-move.php" target="_blank">https://compositionforum.com/issue/39/to-move.php</a>
Kafer, Alison. (2013). <cite>Feminist, queer, crip</cite>. Indiana University Press.
Long COVID Task Force. (2021). <cite>Supporting students with Long COVID In higher education: A workbook for disability service providers</cite> [Workbook]. <cite>DAIS – Disability Access Information and Support</cite>. <a href="https://daisclasses.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target="_blank">https://daisclasses.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf</a>
Mbembé, Joseph-Achille. (2003). Necropolitics (Libby Meintjes, Trans.). <cite>Public Culture</cite>, //15//(1), 11–40.
Nelson, Sandra L., & Vee, Annette. (2022). The view from “Zoom University”: Surveillance and control in higher ed’s pandemic pedagogy pivot. <cite>Enculturation</cite>. <a href=" https://www.enculturation.net/zoom_university" targe="_blank"> https://www.enculturation.net/zoom_university</a>
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. (2018). <cite>Care work: Dreaming disability justice</cite>. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. (2020, August 24). Cripping the resistance: No revolution without us [Blog post]. <cite>Disability Visibility Project</cite>. <a href="https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/24/cripping-the-resistance-no-revolution-without-us/" target="_blank">https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/24/cripping-the-resistance-no-revolution-without-us/</a>
Price, Margaret. (2021). Time harms: Disabled faculty navigating the accommodations loop. <cite>The South Atlantic Quarterly</cite>, //120//(2), 257–277.
Puar, Jasbir. (2017). <cite>The Right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability</cite>. Duke University Press.
Redden, Elizabeth. (2021, October 22). Supporting students with Long COVID. <cite>Inside Higher Ed</cite>. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/10/22/workbook-focuses-supporting-students-long-covid" target="_blank">https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/10/22/workbook-focuses-supporting-students-long-covid</a>
Samuels, Ellen. (2014). Fantasies of identification: Disability, gender, race. New York University Press.
Samuels, Ellen. (2017). Six ways of looking at crip time. <cite>Disability Studies Quarterly</cite>, //37//(3). <a href="https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684" target="_blank">https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684</a>
Siebers, Tobin. (2008). <cite>Disability theory</cite>. University of Michigan Press.
Svrluga, Susan. (2021, September 22). With students back on campus, many faculty members are worried about covid—And pushing back. <cite>The Washington Post</cite>. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/09/22/professors-covid-masks-college-protest/" target=_"blank">https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/09/22/professors-covid-masks-college-protest/</a>
Taiwo, Oyebode A., Cantley, Linda, & Schroeder, Mark. (2008). Impairment and disability evaluation: the role of the family physician. <cite>American Family Physician</cite>, //77//(12), 1689–1694. <a href="https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2008/0615/p1689.html" target="_blank">https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2008/0615/p1689.html</a>
Wong, Alice. (2020, April 4). I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? <cite>Vox</cite>. <a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/4/21204261/coronavirus-covid-19-disabled-people-disabilities-triage" target="_blank"> https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/4/21204261/coronavirus-covid-19-disabled-people-disabilities-triage</a>
##Media credits
Bellanger, Clint. (2009). Food pack cooking [3D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/food-pack-cooking" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/food-pack-cooking>https://opengameart.org/content/food-pack-cooking</a>
Dezra’s Dragons. (2018). Character portrait kit [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/character-portrait-kit" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/character-portrait-kit</a>
FroFox. (2018). Vintage decor [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/vintage-decor" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/vintage-decor</a>
Halfwaywrong. (2021). Garlic [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/evil-garlic-and-heart-oga-summer-jam-2021" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/evil-garlic-and-heart-oga-summer-jam-2021</a>
HomoHikka. (2020). Generic fantasy RPG items [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/generic-fantasy-rpg-items" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/generic-fantasy-rpg-items</a>
JenerikEt. (2019). Handheld gaming console [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/handheld-gaming-console" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/handheld-gaming-console</a>
kotnaszynce. (2019). Dragon [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/dragon-9" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/dragon-9</a>
peony. (2019). Breakfast pixel art [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/breakfast-pixel-art" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/breakfast-pixel-art</a>
Rafaelchm. (2013). Potion bottles [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/potion-bottles" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/potion-bottles</a>
Reemax. (2018). Blackhole picture [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/blackhole-picture" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/blackhole-picture</a>
Spring Spring. (2019). Fire [2D art]. OpenGameArt.org. <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/fire-0" target="_blank">https://opengameart.org/content/fire-0</a>
Talsky, Daniel. Twine CSS Template. GitHub. <a href="https://github.com/danieltalsky/twine-css-template" target="_blank">https://github.com/danieltalsky/twine-css-template</a>
You have 6 seconds to choose one of the following:
[[Request a fully online class->Fully online]]
[[Request a hybrid class->Hybrid]]
[[Hide under a blanket and sob->Sob]]
(live: 6s)[
(go-to: "Other Passage")
]
Your university's administration has set a shiny new arbitrary target for in-person instruction: 93% of all classes ''must'' be taught in person.
The 7% has come to represent a sacred number. To be deemed worthy of seven-percenthood, you must demonstrate a compelling medical need. While your ADA point person denies that your university has a cut-off threshold for how many remote work accommodations they're willing to provide in aggregate, you know better.
In preparation for this request, you undertake your university's "interactive process" for requesting disability accommodations. Structured over a period of several weeks, you engage in a series of didactic conversations with an Accommodation Response Team (ART) composed of your HR rep, the ADA coordinator, your department chair, your department's curriculum staff support person, and some random quiet guy with a clipboard who bears an ambigiously cheerful title: Deputy Assistant Personnel Manager of Risk Provision and Staff Well-Being Support.
According to your dean, hybrid is the solution to all things. You failed.
[[Try again?->You have six seconds]]
Very well! To **create your duck**, you must assign Skill Points to each of your various Personal Attributes! Simply click `[+1]` to assign a point to that skill.
\(set:
_SP to 21, _DX to 25, _CN to 19, _FL to 20, _PC to 18, _UF to 20,
_points to 15, _rerun to (rerun:?skillBoard))\
|skillBoard>[
\(set:_plusLink to (cond:_points > 0, (link:"`[+1]`"),(hidden:)), _minusLink to (link:"`[-1]`"))\
|=
Swiftness:
Ducksterity:
Constitution:
Flight:
Perceptiveness:
Unflappability:
=|
_SP _plusLink[(set:_SP to it + 1, _points to it - 1)_rerun] (if:_SP > 0)[_minusLink[(set:_SP to it - 1, _points to it + 1)_rerun]]
_DX _plusLink[(set:_DX to it + 1, _points to it - 1)_rerun] (if:_DX > 0)[_minusLink[(set:_DX to it - 1, _points to it + 1)_rerun]]
_CN _plusLink[(set:_CN to it + 1, _points to it - 1)_rerun] (if:_CN > 0)[_minusLink[(set:_CN to it - 1, _points to it + 1)_rerun]]
_FL _plusLink[(set: _FL to it + 1, _points to it - 1)_rerun] (if:_FL > 0)[_minusLink[(set:_FL to it - 1, _points to it + 1)_rerun]]
_PC _plusLink[(set: _PC to it + 1, _points to it - 1)_rerun] (if:_PC > 0)[_minusLink[(set:_PC to it - 1, _points to it + 1)_rerun]]
_UF _plusLink[(set: _UF to it + 1, _points to it - 1)_rerun] (if:_UF > 0)[_minusLink[(set:_UF to it - 1, _points to it + 1)_rerun]]
|==|
Available points: (t8n:'pulse')+(t8n-time:0.4s)+(text-colour:(cond:_points > 3, white, _points > 0, yellow,red))[''_points'']]
* (link-rerun:"I want more points")[{
(t8n:"zoom")+(t8n-time:0.4s)(dialog:"You want more points? Sure! Have a bunch more. Attributes don't do anything in this game, so who cares?","Thanks")
(set:_points to it + (random:4,12))
_rerun
}]
* [[I'm ready to go!->3]]#Abstract
"Crip Time Travel" winds us through the aggressions of university disability accommodation policies, asking fellow travelers to rethink their relationships with time, documentation, surveillance, and digitality. Normalcy mandates clash against crip efforts to create more robust, just infrastructures for supporting disabled students and faculty. In this regard, "Crip Time Travel" stories the everydayness of institutional violence in the form of a shitty hypertext game: Through the institution, time merely shifts. Time is not given. There is no “winning” in the accommodation game. If access is the work of risk, then surely it is also the work of reconfiguring institutional tempo/ralities. How might we lurch, tic, and stim to/ward these exploded tempos?#Acknowledgments
This webtext was developed as part of the <a href="https://accessiblefutures.net/" target="_blank">Digital Accessible Futures Lab</a> and the <a href="https://www.disconetwork.org/" target="_blank">DISCO Network</a>, which are supported through funding from the Mellon Foundation. We thank members of the DAF Lab and DISCO for their feedback, as well as fellow Computers & Writing attendees who attended our virtual session!#(bg:yellow)[**crip time travel**]
##reflections on technoableism and the academy
###(bg:yellow)[Sarah Hughes, L. Cynthia Lao, & M. Remi Yergeau]
(align:"===><==")[(button:)[[play the game->long covid workbook]] ]
{(set: $extra to true) <!--This makes the inventory text appear-->
(set: $beg to false) <!--This makes the Restart button appear -->}
#Read Me
For this webtext, we drew inspiration from our individual and cumulative lived experiences, as well as the scholarship and activism of those who’ve come before us. But perhaps the key motivator for our creation of this gameful narrative has been the onslaught of ableist discourse surrounding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mass disabling effects. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/files/media/LongCOVID_Workbook.pdf" target="_blank">Supporting Students with Long COVID In Higher Education: A Workbook for Disability Service Providers</a>, or as we’re calling it, the Long COVID Workbook, is a guide that was collaboratively authored by thirty-two disability services professionals coming from a range of higher education spaces and perspectives, collectively referred to as the Long COVID Task Force (2021). This task force crafted the Workbook in the earl(ier) days of the pandemic, when students experiencing symptoms of Long COVID began reaching out to disability services offices, as an effort to offer a pathway toward ensuring students could be connected with the support they needed.
We’ll spend time with the nuances and details of the Long COVID Workbook, which will be a recurring touchstone throughout this webtext. For now, you should know that our hypertext narrative sardonically envisions disability documentation and accommodation procedures as a game—winding, deceptive, distrustful, and unwinnable.
As you play this technobureaucracy game, you’re going to encounter contradictory instructions, recursive pathways, dead ends. All of this is meant to be emblematic of disability office experiences, an effort to reckon with the unsolvable problem of documentation and accommodation.
Choose one:
* [[I need some accommodations->Accommodation Store]]
* [[I need Crip Credit™->Crip Credit]]
#(bg:yellow)[**Welcome to the Accommodation Store!**
]
*Available in select universities the year after you leave!*
<table width="100%" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th width="30%"><strong>Accommodation icon</strong></th>
<th><strong>Accommodation description</strong></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><img src="img/inventory/spoon.png" alt="spoon" height="32" width="32"></td>
<td>Spoons</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><img src="img/inventory/hourglass.png" width="32" height="32" alt="hourglass"/></td>
<td>Additional time</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><img src="img/inventory/zoom-laptop.png" width="125" height="113" alt=""/></td>
<td>Remote learning/working</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><img src="img/inventory/mentor.gif" width="38" height="50" alt="A person with a fruit and flower basket on their head"/></td>
<td>Able-bodied mentor (from the psych program!)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><img src="img/inventory/notetaker.gif" width="75" height="75" alt="An angry wolf with a notebook"/></td>
<td>Note-taker</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><img src="img/inventory/guide-familiar.gif" width="63" height="40" alt="A trotting fox"/></td>
<td>Guide familiar</td>
<tr>
<td><img src="img/inventory/wheelbarrow.gif" width="100" height="85" alt="A wheelbarrow with an accessibility icon"/></td>
<td>Paratransit</td>
</tr>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
[[Well... that sucks->read me]] {
(set: $arrows to false) <!--this hides the undo/redo arrows (see the Sidebar passage)-->
(set: $extra to false) <!--this hides the inventory text (see the sidebar passage)-->
(set: $beg to true) <!--this keeps the Restart button from appearing on the initial passage-->
}{(if: $arrows is false)[(replace: ?Sidebar)[]] <!--This hides the default Undo/Redo arrows.-->
}
(append: ?Sidebar)
[
[(button:)(link-undo: "undo")][(unless:$beg)+(button:)[[start over->Title page]] ][(button:)[[abstract->Abstract]]] [(button:)[[references->references]] ][(button:)[[credits->Acknowledgments]] ]
]
You're in luck: Your disability services office has the capability of printing accommodation credit cards! These cards enable university students and employees access to a variety of disability services.
Unfortunately for you, there's a wait list due to your university's office being understaffed. (link-rerun: "You decide to inquire about your spot on the waitlist. ")[Your spot, you learn, is (random:100,6000).]
<img src="img/crip_credit.png" width="75%" height="75%" alt="A credit card. The lending institution is named Accommodation Banking, and the credit card's expiration date is Whenever You Send Us More Paperwork. The cardholder is listed as Not You. In place of the typical Mastercard logo are two of the iconic wheelchair user icons, layered back to back.">
[[Well... that sucks.->read me]]