‘Straight from a Night Shift to the Infusions’: Crip Temporalities at Work

This article explores how disabled people navigate normative temporalities in the workplace through everyday practices of adaptation and resistance. Grounded in qualitative research with disabled participants, it examines how linear, productivity-driven temporal norms—referred to as chrononormativity —shape discriminatory and exclusionary structures that possess constitutive power in the production of disability. Using the lens of crip time, the analysis reveals how ongoing temporal negotiations and adjustments generate additional labour for disabled people and challenge the common assumption that flexibility offers a sufficient remedy to temporal constraints. The article thereby contributes to broader debates on disability, work and precarity while strengthening and empirically supporting critiques of the ableist foundations of the labour system, which marginalise those whose temporalities diverge from the norm. Ultimately, it calls for temporality—until now largely overlooked—to be foregrounded as one of the key structuring forces of ableism in the workplace.