Learning on crip time: The missing student in your lecture

My arts degree in sociology has frequently left out disability from its discussions on gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality and class despite it being the one identity everyone acquires at some point in their life.

Disability is also the one identity that has deeply shaped who I am as a person. I tried to make up for my missing community by focusing many of my assignments on disability theory and the issues of ableism and inaccessibility we face in relation to colonialism and capitalism. And while many of those around me discussed the things they had learnt in their classes, I was too distracted with trying to plan my lecture attendances against frequently broken library elevators, missing automatic door opener buttons and hospital stays. 

In completing my degree last year, my education experience at university has left much to be desired in terms of pursuing my own interests and their relevance to critical theories. While repeatedly experiencing inaccessible assignment structures and brand new buildings failing to meet the access needs of disabled students like me who have paid the same costs as everyone else to access. 

It is these experiences that made me consider pursuing postgraduate study to write a dissertation centred on what I saw as the missing link to other identities in sociology: critical disability studies. However, in exploring application requirements and study time periods for an honours degree, my study would have a time limit as a part time student. I’d need to complete my honours part time within a two-year period with only a small extension for the dissertation component if unforeseen circumstances occurred to me. But in growing up with and inhabiting the body I have, I have adjusted to, learned and relearned my body's limits and needs when it comes to commitments like attending university. I know pushing myself to complete this degree in two years is not physically possible, no matter how badly I want to make it work so I can further my study.

This year alone I have been in and out of hospitals and after hours clinics and outpatient specialists more times than I can count on my hands. I have gone off and on new medication, had anaphylaxis and a spinal MRI, all the while attending lectures and tutorials, writing assignments, weekly quizzes, getting attendance grades, doing readings and studying for exams. With the experience my undergraduate degree has given me, I know it’s likely these experiences will happen again while studying honours and that I may need to take a semester or a year off to attend to any new emerging health issues. 

In trying to explain my situation to a university programme advisor, their advice was that: “students need to be sure they can manage the workload before committing to the programme”. And if I am unable to meet the requirements needed for honours that I could apply for a Postgraduate Diploma instead. Except the diploma does not include a dissertation, which was the whole reason I wanted to pursue my honours so I could write and research my academic interests on critical disability studies. And while a diploma may give me a pathway for further study like an honours does, there’s also a risk that in trying to explain my situation, my options are even further limited. What happens if the path I've chosen to pursue is suddenly shut in front of me by others who are solely judging me on my perceived capability as a disabled student? And if the university is using these predetermined requirements made only for non-disabled students - and not judging me by my GPA score - are these other options they’re providing really choices I myself get to make?

One of these problems is that my foresight and estimations of my body's capabilities are not “unforeseen circumstances” and so I am left with the reality that if I do enrol, I may not be given the time extensions I’ll need. There’s a possibility that if I enrol there’s no guarantee I can successfully graduate. But this is not a matter of me being unable to tolerate the workload of the degree, I know that I can do it. However, my body runs on its own crip time, something that is incompatible with the required completion timeframe. Through this, I have come to learn that it is the prioritising of our own needs in these environments - of watching lecture recordings from bed and utilising assignment extensions - that creates disabled success. Our bodies and their dreams should no longer be crushed for the academic machine. Disabled success will not come from us bowing down to what they want us to look like, act like and talk like. It is only through contesting these rules that attempt to warp us into ‘normal’ students by creating our own accessible study that we can begin to contest the roots that allow for such mistreatment and exclusion to take place. We as disabled students are fundamentally at odds with the university, an institution built to keep us out. While it claims to care for our equity and inclusion, we continue to be failed by student services, programme advisors, maintenance and admissions teams and our own professors. 

There is no flexibility in the degree structure for disabled students to complete an honours degree in the timeframe one's bodymind requires. This is the result of the binary of normality and the seeping of capitalist rot that created these ideas of ‘the average student’. Enforcing a time limit places undue pressure on disabled students to excel past their limitations. It’s a hypocritical fight against disability for fleeting recognition in ableist academic institutions. It pretends that if we can win the game to prove we deserve our place in academia, then non-disabled people will respect us, but it is their own notions of disability, access and success that reinforce these struggles.

In fighting to stay at university as a disabled student I have become confident in myself and my needs that I no longer desire to push my body's limits to reach the standards of non-disabled success anymore. I no longer see the point in trying to conform my bodymind into categories of abled normality in order to get a chance at fitting in with them. Academic study has never been structured in ways that actually support and allow for disabled students to succeed, to graduate or to even just survive in. 

I believe now more than ever that studying and living in crip time, working alongside our capacities rather than pushing them is a practice that combats these hyper-independent attitudes peddled by colonial capitalism and its profit-incentivised institutions. If we are the ones paying to study then it is just our right as anyone’s to access it in the exact ways we need it to be for us, not what's best for the system. Restrictive time limits on part time study inherently dictate how disabled students must either push themselves to meet these time limits and the requirements made only with non-disabled students in mind. Otherwise, we are forced to drop out because these deliberately inaccessible study environments just don’t work for us. I know my experience is just one of hundreds of others in our country, which makes me wonder how many of our ghosts occupy the many empty seats in our lecture halls? How many opportunities, essays, inventions and contributions have been lost because of the institution's refusal for disabled students to study and live in the ways they require?

Are there any solutions to problems like these that could exist? I believe that all study should drop time limit requirements, but especially the postgraduate honours degree. Understandings of disabled realities and needs for advocacy and true equitable accessibility across all universities and tertiary education services is needed. Additionally, student disability services are being chronically underfunded and not given enough power to properly support disabled students needs in this ableist university system. It is the inaccessibility of our universities and of the world that isolate us from one another so that we are unable to discuss our shared experiences and fight against them as a collective. Radicalising our disabled student associations and forming a united front against such shared experiences of inaccessibility and ableism must be one of many next steps. Using radical interdependence and accessibility made for and by disabled students gives us the power to collectively pressure our administrators to meet such demands.

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