Dolphin
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
3: Outside Knowledge: exploring the excluded spacetime of energy limiting conditions
Catherine Hale
in Disability in a Turbulent Era
Category: ChapterPublished: 21 Aug 2026Page Range: 37–52
Collection: Sociology, Social Policy and Education 2026DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035347254.00011Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Keywords: Crip spacetime; Energy limiting conditions; Welfare; Epistemic violence; Epistemic exclusion; Academia
This chapter looks at how disabled people, especially those with energy limiting conditions (ELCs), are often ignored or pushed aside when it comes to whose knowledge and ideas matter.
The author writes from their own perspective as a researcher with an ELC, working on the edges of academic life.
Drawing on Margaret Price's idea of ‘crip spacetime’, the chapter focuses on three common experiences of living with limited energy: the crash or ‘payback’ after activity; problems with memory and concentration; and being ‘housebound’, or trapped at home.
These everyday realities are often hidden, doubted or not understood outside the ELC community.
The chapter ends by calling for people with ELCs to be included in sharing and shaping knowledge, through different kinds of support and adjustments.
This could help disabled people, both inside and outside of academic systems, to come together and push back against unfair systems that disadvantage everyone.