Dissing Time, Disabling Narrative

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Encounters with Method: Narrative, Decolonial, and Diffractive Reorientations

Abstract

The theoretical assumptions underlying the invocation of experience as “narrative,” though valuable for its political gains, produce a conception of time within narratives that is linear, objective and extrinsic. Disabled scholars seek to “crip” time to unravel its normative chronology, implicating socio-temporal networks that produce its ableist effects. In this paper, we inquire alongside Spencer, an autistic and intellectually disabled participant during a series of art-making sessions where we invited disabled students to express imaginings of school and learning. Thinking with the concept of duration (Bergson, 1910), which is more aligned with lived time, we plug into our encounters with Spencer to arrive at four ways of dissing time—giggling time, dreaming time, hacking time and infecting time.

Authors

• Srikala Naraian, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Maria S. Guarino, Teachers College, Columbia University