Crip linguistics frames language as a form of care work where we work collectively to provide access and co-construct meaning.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics

We introduce Crip Linguistics as a theoretical and abolitionist framework. People use languages in different ways. Some people use language to help find other people like themselves. Many people use language in specific ways because of how their body and mind work. Sometimes a person’s material conditions, and environment forces them to use language in a certain way. When someone languages outside of what people think is normal, others can think they are bad with language, or are not as smart as someone else. No one is actually ‘bad with language.’ We want to help people understand that no language is bad. It is okay to want to change your language use if it will make you feel better. No one should make you feel badly about your language. We need a bigger and more flexible understanding of what language is.

Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto | Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability

Crip Linguistics is a way for linguistics to analyze disability as a variationist perspective in languaging. It asks linguists to understand that language cannot be disordered, but bodies can be disordered in a way that affects languaging. And often, how people perceive disordered bodies make them think that the language produced by those bodies is disordered (when it’s not).

PsyArXiv Preprints | How to train your abled linguist: A Crip Linguistics perspective on pragmatic research

We are trying to point out that no one is actually ‘bad with language.’ Our goal with this paper is to help people understand that no language is bad.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics

Crip languaging incorporates practices of access intimacy, adaptions of technology, and relationality. To sum up, disabled people do really cool things with language if people would pay attention.

View of Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto

Mia Mingus in Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) describe access intimacy as a “crip relational practice produced when interdependence informs the making of access” (p.14). As such, interdependent ways of languaging, like augmented speech, do not appeal to many abled people. For example, as Mackay’s (2003) work with aphasia patients showed, the patients were viewed as incompetent because of their voicelessness. Given an acceptance of interdependence and care work in languaging via crip time, the patients would be viewed as competent (Rossetti et al., 2008).

Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto | Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability

Hamraie (2013) asks us to think about the politics of access through the framework of interdependence. Languaging, as an important site of access—to the world, to politics, to belonging, to citizenship—thus demands that we think about this through the lens of collective access and care. Rejecting monolingualism and mono-modality are two beginning steps. Embracing time, space, and material environments in meaning-making are also preliminary steps. Interdependence also asks us to think about our built environments and how that impacts access (Hamraie, 2013), and in our case, language. Hamraie (2017) also instigates us to consider how discrimination is built into the structures around us, the buildings, the foundations, the frameworks, and theories, and so on. When in the process of crippling linguistics, we question how modality chauvinism has been built into the various language focused fields and the perspectives of what language is and what is good languaging. Hamraie and Fritsch’s (2019) practices of “interdependence, access intimacy, and collective access can be understood as alternative political technologies through Crip technoscience” (p.13). Crip technoscience is “critique, alteration, and reinvention” (p.2). It is how disabled people alter and reinvent the world in order to make access happen. The relationship between science, technology, and language is such that the dismissal of disabled ways of languaging has resulted in inaccessible technologies.

Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto | Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability

One lesson from crip languaging is the idea of interdependence and forms of access intimacy through the discourse process.

View of Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto

These and other material practices describe a crip technoscientific sensibility wherein disabled interdependence also enables what Mingus (2017) calls “access intimacy,” a crip relational practice produced when interdependence informs the making of access.

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

If, as Kafer argues, disabled people have often uneasy or “ambivalent relationships to technology” (2013, p. 119), our practices of interdependence, access intimacy, and collective access can be understood as alternative political technologies: “disabled people,” she writes, “are not cyborgs…because of our bodies (e.g., our use of prosthetics, ventilators, or attendants), but because of our political practices” (p. 120). Crip technoscience offers interdependence as a central analytic for disability–technology relations, recognizing that in disability culture, community, and knower-maker practices, interdependence acts as a political technology for materializing better worlds.

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

Further reading,