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Paper short abstract

Through crip time and crip futurity, disability anthropology refuses ableist temporality, instead using extended pauses, asynchronous collaboration, and variable pacing as conditions for staying with trouble and cultivating crip futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that disability anthropology, as a disability‑centered, action‑oriented, and Indigenous‑inspired project, offers a concrete model for imagining inclusive worlds from within anthropology’s own fragmented, precarious landscape. Drawing on crip time and crip futurity, I show how disability anthropology refuses the discipline’s default ableist temporality—its assumption of a non‑disabled researcher who can move freely, stay indefinitely, and conform to linear fieldwork and publication schedules (Kafer 2013; Ginsburg & Rapp 2024). Instead, it operates on crip time: projects involve extended pauses, asynchronous collaboration, and variable pacing that reflect disabled lives, without treating these shifts as failures.

Disability anthropology inherits action anthropology’s double mandate (Tax 1975) but reorients it around disabled and Indigenous epistemologies as co‑equal sources of theory and method (Menzies 2013; Montoya et al. 2023). It treats media, archives, and film festivals as sites of crip occupation, where disabled creators take up space that settler and ableist orders have reserved for other bodies (Moore 2023; Linton 2015). In this way, disability anthropology is not a redemption of the discipline, but an ongoing experiment in staying with its trouble: bending the clock, refusing to leave, and cultivating the crip futures disabled people and their communities are already building.