Essay
Craig Slee, Loes Damhof, Martin Calnan
Independent disabled writer, consultant & theorist. Lancaster, UK
UNESCO Chair on Futures Literacy in Higher Education at Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands
UNESCO Chair on the Future of Value at Ecole des Ponts Business School, Paris, France
Keywords
Dis/ability. futures literacy, anticipation, emergence, crip theory
Introduction
Let’s sit absolutely still for a few minutes.
In Paris at the World Futures Studies Federation’s 2023 conference, we asked attendees during our keynote on (Dis)abling futures, to sit absolutely still for a few minutes, as an experiment in ‘failure’. To be aware of the space, to try and put aside the urge to make sense of the things discussed and to just sense for a few minutes.
Trying to remain absolutely immobile is impossible, so what is ongoing in that failure? Concessions were made to blinking and breathing, and it is perhaps important to note that they indeed were concessions: the audience admitting to themselves the invitation was impossible to complete fully and absolutely -and experiencing their relationship to that failure.
(Dis)abled by their own bodies, presented with the limits of voluntarism, even with the accommodation of the need to breathe and blink extended, this was an encouragement for attendees to notice the ongoing processes in which they were involved. Processes that were, and are, integral to life, and over which they had no ‘control’.
What we are inviting here, and in the original experiment, is grounded in the realisation that disability is a field which extends beyond the individual, and individual bodies. If ableism is likewise a field; a network and assemblage of relationality and responsitivity, where might futures thinking be playing into ableist assumptions about (un)encumbrance, freedom and agency?
We are asking, in what ways are we all encumbered – shaped by our entanglements, our ontologies, cosmovisions, epistemologies, our various embodiments, lived realities and conditionalities. What other agencies, and intelligences exist which trouble the notions of agency, control and humanness itself?
This invitation is best understood as a crooked, cripping, of a concept of futures. With reference to crip theory, as articulated by McRuer (2006) and others, what we are musing on is (perhaps) a previously unconsidered imaginarium. We are attempting to consider that multiplicity of (dis)ability in the similar arena to the dis/human, borrowing from Godley and Runswick-Cole’s (2014) subtitle “thinking about the human through disability”.
So, what happens if we engage with futures through a (dis)ability lens?
In F. K. Campbell’s work on Studies in Ableism, ableism is defined as:
“[a]system of causal relations about the order of life that produces processes and systems of entitlement and exclusion. This causality fosters conditions of microaggression,
internalized ableism and, in their jostling, notions of (un)encumbrance. A system of dividing practices, ableism institutes the reification and classification of populations. Ableist systems involve the differentiation, ranking, negation, notification and prioritization of sentient life”. (Campbell, 2017: 287–288).
Disability has a peculiar relationship with futures thinking and studies. Often disability plays a stark role in dystopian futures, whereas utopian or desirable futures are deprived of any form of disability as if they were futureless (Morgan, Tutton, 2024). From a theoretical perspective, little has been said or written about the connection between the two, using either a sociology lens (Margan & Tutton, 2024) or the idea that disability needs futures thinking as a way to undo an injustice (Goggin, 2005), a form of activism that could foster inclusion (Baker et al, 2017). Other scholars have argued that envisioning inclusive and diverse futures and scenarios could drive policy needed to further the cause for equality for the disabled, and disability service and governmental organizations to adapt to a rapidly changing world (Russo, 2017; Inayatullah 2003, Brandt, 1996).
These papers on the importance of the potential relationship between futures thinking and disability studies are crucial steps in starting the dialogue on how crip theory, disability studies and futures studies can mutually benefit each other. In this paper, we intend to take an enhanced approach: to use disability and crip theory as a lens through which we can rethink the way we think about the future. Starting with a sensory experience that invites us not to envision a disabled future, but to feel what is failing us when we are trying to be still, we offer a phenomenological approach to dis/ableism.
With this in mind, and understanding that we dwell in a socio-material reality formed from the inter-and-intra relation of multiple complex systems of ableism, we are attempting to invite an exploration of the way ableism both inflects futures thinking, but also wondering what disabled lived-experience might do to notions of desirability, and relations to space and time.
Through an embodied experience of being (un)able to be still, we discover and explore the crossroads that is the liminal space where ableism is met by disability. Finally, we examine how ableism permeates the notion of time itself – past, present and future.
An Invitation to be Still
The journey begins with an experiment in failure. To accept our absence of volition, agency and control. An invitation to be still. Completely still. It is an invitation, rather than an instruction, an attempt, rather than a completed or complete-able action. Realising that the reader may instinctively be in a mode which defaults to seek and anticipate the construction of coherence, the making-of-sense in lines of thought and argument, the invitation is expansive: we invite you to dwell, to notice, to savour, to be curious about what is happening right now as you read this, within-and-through your bodymind. An invitation to sensing, to noticing that which is ongoing, which you are amidst even now. An invitation to notice how ‘your’ posture may not even be entirely yours, but is shaped by the way you hold this physical or digital page, and the way it might hold you; noticing the temperature and conditions of the room in which you currently reside; the feel of fabric against your skin, the pressings-against-you of floor, wall, chair, seat, or bed.
All this, and that, and also, vice-versa.
While you are attempting to be still, hearts continue to beat, as lungs consume oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; pores and tear-ducts go on leaking oils, sweat, and lubricants. Kidneys fill bladders and intestines pulse in their own rhythm, with the valves and sphincters opening and closing, rising and flushing. All of these ‘ongoingnesses’ are common, often unnoticed in a world that thinks in terms of will, agency, ability, skill, execution and completion.
An invitation to being completely still and understanding one will fail, forces us to examine our sense of agency, our desire to act and do. Agency is closely linked to how we anticipate (Kazemier et al, 2021), but not in the way one might think. The need to act needs a sense of urgency as well as the ability to act. But agency is more than a human centred perspective on performing an act: it is the delicate, distorted balance between doing and not-doing, being alert in the present while being open to emergence (Miller, 2018). Being aware of how we use the future, requires an understanding of what that means in the now. If we restrict our sense of agency solely to human volition, action or doing, we will overlook how things, non-humans and non-things are bodies that are moving, acting, doing. Being still does not mean we are still. It merely means we stop moving in a way we (usually) interpret and perceive as agency and being in control.
Entire worlds and processes go unnoticed for this human centred perception because they rarely have a recognisable ‘start’ or ‘stop’, they remain undiscovered because they exceed encompassment: they are, in a very real sense liminal — in-between-and-in-betweening – which overspills the thresholds between perception, choice, categorization and control. Rather than seeking the threshold and methods of outline and definition, in this invitation we invite ambiguity, potential obscurity, unsurety blurriness, and infirmity, and leakage.
We attempt to hold knowing in abeyance, favouring experiencing over experience. Questions of ‘how’ may never be answered, and even questions of ’what’ are likely to shapeshift and wriggle in surprising ways. Even the ‘why’ shapeshifts, shedding some of its arrogance. It is in these liminal spaces where we can change the way we relate to change. Where too often being in a liminal space feels as an invite to move, step over the threshold, explore the unknown, we invite you to be still instead and sense this space. What changes? What movements externally and internally emerge?
This invitation is to become aware of the very limited scope of our understanding and control, of our very sensibility and sensing. The invitation is to reconsider deeply the meaning of entanglement. To feel the weight of it, the sheer encumbrance, and therefore our inevitable dis/ability to capture its miraculous complexity. Not as an act of defeat or despair, but simply as a necessary first step to opening our senses to a deeper sense of belonging.
In taking time to experience both the reading of this piece and the experience of stillness-failure, you may have noted a motif of repetition. The same things or words used multiple times – for example, the repeated use of the word ‘invitation’. We invite you to lean into this noticing deeply too. What do our notions of repeatability, replicability assume? What deeper cosmogony do they betray? What markers do we use to identify a repetition as ‘the same’ or ‘different’? Can we see beyond our usual ideas of repetition, discipline even – sensing a different kind of novelty in the familiar? (Dis)abled, dis/abled, or disabled bodies are not monolithic – nor are they bodies which necessarily function as stable sites of agency. A process which is easily replicable for the nondisabled may not be so for the otherwise.
Consider the way you might perform an everyday task without thinking – even something so simple as raising an eating utensil to bring food to your mouth in order to eat. Now consider that you may deal with spastic muscle spasms, which may come at any time, as one of the authors of this piece does, meaning that ‘eating’ as a process, as an understanding, is not stable as concept.
Each attempt, each repetition, is not in fact a repeat, but a new event; there is no absolute guarantee of what it entails, or may be experienced. Disability and novelty go hand in hand – and in this spirit we invite you to notice apparent repetition as site-to-sense-again – to wonder what lies hidden beneath your standard contourings and narrations of what-is-happening.
Where Our Imagined Bodies Meet
Now consider a crossroads for a moment.
Do you notice the archetypal four different directions to go to, or four different directions from where we meet in the middle, in the potential liminal space. Do you wonder why we imagine four directions? Are they cardinal coordinates? What of all the spaces in between… Must there be direction for there to be intersection? What if the intersection were a place and space of meeting… convening… presencing… mingling…
What might we find at such a liminal confluence, where the meeting place is neither one road, nor the other? Indeed, for all that the roads could be said to give shape to that space, is it not possible to encounter the crossroads by approaching from off-road?
As ambiguous, liminal territory, it can be a place where travelers meet; a bustling inn or busy marketplace; an agora. Yet it can also be a deserted, isolated place, a space of the gallows and the gibbet; a place of transversal occurring where devils, gods and other strange numinosities may meet with humankind. What matters here, in a very material sense, is that the crossroads is a place of encounter and entanglement, a place where a singular road requires another in order to exist. That is, agency is not solely the province of one singular entity, but a multiplicity. And yet, consider for an instant, the importance, the weight, the power we attribute to it. It fills our reality to the exclusion of all else. And it is based on our being able to capture, dissect, make sense of and control the constituent elements of that single encounter upon which we scaffold our sense of agency. Conveniently forgetting the myriad encounters, interactions, co-minglings, coalescings, interdependencies, repulsions and revulsions that we are blind to.
Dis/abling our futures (and present!) may in a way be the crucial step for us to sufficiently shift our way of thinking. For it is an invitation to reconnect to our elemental interdependence and accept the limits of our diagnostic intelligence and science, while opening to the social sensing of the impenetrable, pervasive and ethereal encumbrance of existence.
With this in mind, and understanding that we dwell in a socio-material reality formed from the inter-and-intra relation of multiple complex systems of ableism, we are attempting to invite an exploration of the way ableism inflects futures thinking, but also wondering what disabled lived-experience might do to notions of desirability, and relations to space and time. Scholars and writers at the crossroads of Science Technology and Society, Philosophy, and Disability Studies have repeatedly emphasised the point that relations-to-and-with disability have always influenced the way we imagine – from Damien P. Williams’ Heavenly Bodies: Why It Matters That Cyborgs Have Always Been About Disability, Mental Health, and Marginalization (2019), to works like Ashley Shew’s more recent book Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (2023) amongst many.
But more so than future images inhabiting disabilities, it is also our way of using futures that raises questions about our own ability, one’s faculty to address and perceive disability: namely seeing it as a problem in itself. If we apply Shew’s approach on how to think about disability through experiencing disability, we might adopt a new way of thinking all together. Inhabit a new crossroads of sorts.
Crip Time
Ableism seems to have a strong correlation to our concept of time or more specifically to our fear of its inexorably debilitating and disabling nature. This fear of losing our autonomy, both literally and figuratively, to fend for ourselves, to master our destiny – in other words, the fear of being unable to bend others to our will and the environment to our control. To no longer have the power of autonomy of separating that which is inseparable. This notion of power is deeply embedded in our collective psyche and mythology. It is the myth of Kronos, in Greek mythology, who latterly becomes equated with Chronos, god of time. It is Kronos the Titan, who eats his children, the world-ordering Olympians, as time could be seen to eat us all. But in our ’modern’ understanding that is not an acceptable cosmogony. We must somehow defeat time, as Zeus does. It is not a coincidence that one could see, with modernity’s eyes, the founding myth of the Greek pantheon as the death of time – or at least the victory over its inexorable passing. The triumph of ableism.
In contrast to this triumph of ‘ableist time’, Ellen Samuels quotes a friend, Alison Kafer in her essay Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time (2017): “[R]ather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”
In a world not built for disabled people, where even the idea of access involves attempting to give the disabled a seat at the present, already-determined-as-superior, non-disabled table in the name of inclusion, equality, and equity, there is a liberationary context involved in re-evaluating our relationship to time and space. Who, or what, says our relationality has to be defined or performed in a particular way?
Yet, as Samuels also points out: “[…]crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don’t want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.” (Samuels, 2017)
This breaking, this rupture, this generative incapacity requires the simultaneous presencing of grief and relief. Even for those of us “born disabled,” we are accompanied by grief, while simultaneously becoming increasingly aware that our lives and experiences, skills and methodologies may actually be desiring-and-desirable. And in so doing, we explore the limits of our language itself. After all, why must crip time be broken time in a negative sense… What if crip time were as sought and desired as modern, fixed, hygienic and regulated time?
Consider the crossroads again for a moment.
As a meeting-place, it is a space where ableism and dis/ability (or (dis)ability) can also relate; a blurry conflux where ableism’s usual supremacy is challenged; where other, previously occulted experiences and previously suppressed imaginaries come to the fore.
That liminal space-and-time is experienced differently for the one in chronic pain. The wheelchair user may feel depressions and textures of the road completely unnoticed by the ambulatory and upright; the moment may be thick with the gravitational leanings of camber and slope; vibration may sing up spines, a wheel may become caught in a divot which changes the entire quality of this road, or that. The very notion of road-as-path, as channel of-easy-passage may be subverted, generations of passing having worn non-disabled smoothness into the landscape which is now presenting burr-and-thorn to the wheelchair user: it may snag and snatch the cane from a hand.
Perhaps a trip then, a failing fall: a sudden intimate acquaintance with gravel, leaf, and asphalt as one forcibly touches, and is touched in turn. Do you know the smell of that road, up close, without the supposed benefit of distance? Nose pressed on the earth, body aching from impact?
At least one of us does, here. Whether that be through the medium of metal, fibre, and plastic, or ejected and crawling like the cripple (the clue is in the etymology of that word). What becomes obvious is that there are myriad realities flexing in every moment. The sudden stop is an interruption in the flow of time, an unexpected crossroads where space and time meet abruptly. It offers a crack in the fabric of ‘normality’ and a medium to a new sensing, a more intimate perception, a weirding of the expected.
There is a sensuous nature to this; in understanding that even the most familiar may be rendered strange by incapacity; that when we engage with the breaking, and the cracks in the parlance of previous WFSF Conference keynote speaker Bayo Akomolafe, we may discover new experiences, new imaginaries, new ways of being-with-and-in-the world.
Or more accurately, we may uncover more of what is already emerging and submerging, which appears new to us. This invitation, and its preparatory discussions, was born of meeting-and-sharing between its authors – the experiences, ontologies, lives and animist wanderings/wonderings of a self-identified crip and wheelchair user, a storyteller and an educator. Only through that meeting could we sense-through-and with. We did not know what would emerge, committing only to the idea of liminality.
Emergence
Being open to new ways of being, requires being open to emergence, to the unexpected, the novelty. It requires vulnerability to let go of previously held anticipatory beliefs, anxieties and joy.
Seeing the present through the lens of dis/ability, is a way of practicing anticipation for emergence: the anticipatory system that allows us to explore futures to identify our anticipatory assumptions. Miller (2018) makes a clear distinction between two systems of using the future: anticipation for emergence (AfE) and anticipation for the future (AfF), the latter referring to planning and preparation as ways to get a grip on the present. These anticipatory systems may differ, but we need them both: understanding when we use futures for what purpose in what context makes us futures literate (Miller, 2018).
To embody both systems, we need to enhance ways to anticipate for emergence, since so much in our world is controlled, planned and prepared for. Exploring futures to identify and unpack our anticipatory assumptions in order to see the present anew is not a common practice, nor do many of such exploratory spaces exist. Seeing the present through ableism and (dis)ability is another entry point that helps us to apply anticipation for emergence: through the lens of disabled futures, we can sense more, see novelty and invite cracks in otherwise stuck narratives. (Dis)abled futures offer a complementary ontology and epistemology, fostering AfE and a new sense of agency that involves not-doing, next to a more human, ableist, productivity-centered version of agency. This not-doing is not about doing nothing or being complacent, but advocates for an alert way of sensing, to be observant (Damhof, 2022). By being open to emergence and novelty through not-doing, our agency does not stop; it is not impaired. Rather it is (dis)abled and allows us to see new ways of doing and being in the world. Where anticipation for the future implies goal setting and therefore choice, anticipation for emergence enhances our perception (Kazemier et al, 2021) and absence of choice. Potentially even inability to choose. By experiencing the world through a (dis)ability lens – leaning into the (dis) and experiencing a type of crip-future,-time, -space, -normality and -causality – even just for a moment by being still, we are opening ourselves up for emergence.
The reason this is framed as an invitation is that we do not have a firm grip on what (Dis)abling Futures is – indeed, that lack of firm grip, that incapacity is vital. We do not simply recognize that the experiences of disabled people have phenomenological value, or that we should merely “include disabled voices in futures thinking”. It is our own inescapable phenomenological (dis)ability we are calling on. Still our understanding is as shaky as our grip itself: a hand might be shaken when raising a mug to mouth by the spasms of Cerebral Palsy, and that this very shakiness changes and destabilizes everything we think we might know about that mug, or its contents of tea or coffee. Our open, nondescript exploratory idea of disabled futures allows us to challenge our thinking about disabling futures simultaneously.
Further this is an invitation precisely because there are others involved, beyond the writers and those cited; the presences, agencies and affordances of online video meeting and collaborative document platforms are intimately involved here, as well as the qualities of the places and landscape where this paper is written, and the way industry, urbanisation and geography meet.
The more we consider, the more we do not know; the more we realise we cannot have, or keep, ‘a sense’ but are constantly, sensuously sensing and relating-to-and-with. The ableist systems and ontologies have constructed themselves as defaults, with themselves as desirable, as necessary even – at the top of the rankings, while disability is constructed as one of the ultimate negations at the bottom. Even these directional notions of value are culturally constructed – disability shapeshifts as a relational field, constructed and constructing as ongoing processural experience, however fixed we might believe its values to be.
“Vision” as positive. “Blindness” as negative. To be disabled is to be brave, to operate always, and in all contexts, as a synonym for “undesirable” according to many. But what if disability simply is, like so much else, an ongoing, polyvalent, and multiplicitous series of flows? What if our definition of disability is ultimately just another brick in the brittle wall we have erected to protect us from a world we cannot control in which even just being still is beyond our ability?
Last Thoughts
None of the above are solutions to anything, but eager invitations to explore, wander, question.
So, we ask, if disability extends beyond the personal, if it is possible to consider “disabled ecologies” (Taylor, 2019, 2024) then might we consider the ways we are all encumbered? The way we are (dis)abled, and (dis)able in turn, the ways we shape, are rendered crooked, and cripped, by space and time?
Instead of attempting to “fix” or “judge” might we find our shaky, stumbling unsure way into futures and lives that are luxurious, palsied, stuttering, fumblings in the queer light where one-legged and one-eyed tricksters laugh at us at the crossroads? Allowing ourselves to consider disabled futures as an exploratory entrypoint from which we can imagine, challenge and examine our own agency and power, it is not the answer to choose which direction. It is a way to get lost instead.
References
Akomolafe, B. Online source: https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/
Baker, P. M. A. et al. (2016) Inclusive connected futures: Editorial introduction to special section on“Envisioning Inclusive Futures” Futures. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.12.002
Brandt, R. (1996) The future of work and disability: policy and scenarios. Thesis (PhD) University of Hawaii
Campbell, F.K. (2017). Queer Anti-sociality and Disability Unbecoming An Ableist Relations Project? in O. Sircar & D.Jain. (eds). New Intimacies/Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times. Zubaan Books, pp.280 – 316.
Damhof, L. (2022). Sensing and sense-making. Why we need the ways of the trickster to embrace uncertainty. Medium: https://loesdamhof.medium.com/sensing-and-sense-making-a12b43ce0762
Damhof, L., Kazemier, E., Gulmans, J., Cremers, P, Doornbos, A. & Beenen, P. (2020). Anticipation for emergence: Defining, designing and refining futures literacy in higher education. In: Humanistic futures of learning: perspectives from UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks.
Goggin, G. & Newell, C. (2005) Imaging Disability Tomorrow. Journal of Futures Studies. 10(2): 69 – 74
Goodley, D., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2014). Becoming dishuman: thinking about the human through dis/ability. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.930021
Inayatullah, S. (2016) Alternative futures of genetics and disability. Journal of Futures Studies. 7(4): 76-72
Kazemier, E.M., Damhof, L., Gulmans, J. & Cremers, P.H.M. (2021).Mastering Futures Literacy in Higher Education: an evaluation of learning outcomes and instructional design of a faculty development program. In Futures. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102814
Lewis, C.T., Short , C.(1879) A Latin Dictionary. Clarendon Press
Morgan, H., & Tutton, R. (2024). Enabling futures? Disability and sociology of futures. Journal of Sociology, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833241248193
McRuer, R. (2006). Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York University Press
Miller, R. (2018) Transforming the Future. Anticipation in the 21st Century. Routledge
Russo, C. (2017) National Disability Futures – how the NDS and Futures Studies are Helping Service Providers to Create Preferred Futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 21(3): 49–64 https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.2017.21(3).A49
Samuels, E. (2017). Six ways of looking at crip time. 37 (3) . https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/5824/4684
Shew, A. (2023). Against techno ableism. Rethinking who needs improvement. Norton Books
Taylor, S. (2019). Talk: Disabled Ecologies. Living with impaired landscapes. Othering and belonging institute, Berkeley, California. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/video-sunaura-taylor-disabled-ecologies-living-impaired-landscapes
Taylor, S. (2024). Disabled Ecologies. Lessons from a Wounded Desert. University of California Press
Williams, D. P. (2019). Heavenly bodies: Why it matters that cyborgs have always been about disability, mental health, and marginalization. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.340134