Ableism in higher education: the negation of crip temporalities within the neoliberal academy

ABSTRACT

Within Australian universities, neoliberalism has transformed education into a marketplace and product, where academic employees are regulated and controlled through metrics, productivity, and pressure to maintain and increase ‘value’. In this environment, disabled academics face increasing barriers to workplace participation and meaningful inclusion. To explore the lived experiences of disabled academics, this article draws upon qualitative survey and interview data collected from disabled academics to consider the ways that the academy excludes and disables them. Specifically, we argue that the way time is regulated and managed within the neoliberal university is ableist, and fails to account for the crip temporalities by which disabled academics live their lives. The concept of crip and cripping time in relation to disabled academics opens up new ways of thinking, doing, and being that are not constrained by normative (clock) time that marginalises disabled subjects. While we focus on an Australian context, the near-universalising ‘logics’ of normative time and neoliberal-ableism inherent to universities and societies more generally has implications for everyone. We argue that it is incumbent upon universities to rethink prevailing notions of time that currently elide the experiences and capacities of disabled academics.

KEYWORDS:

• Ableism
• academia
• Australia
• crip time
• neoliberal-ableism

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the study participants for your candid and thoughtful contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Western Sydney University Research Development Fund Grant.