‘This Constant Judgement Call’: Living with Traumatic Brain Injury as Crip Time

This article investigates the shifting temporal dimensions of living with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and persistent injury-related symptoms (PIRS). Drawing from 30 semi-structured interviews, we use the concept of crip time to explore how the participants navigate, perceive, negotiate and embody time differently since injury. Through the themes of waiting time, work time, pacing time, and unpredictable time, we illustrate how crip time is both a valuable resource and constraint for people living with TBI. These central themes provide insight into how and why participants moved in and out of normative time across different and intersecting life domains. Our findings demonstrate that moving in and through crip time helped participants to re-frame their life to centralise their needs and wellbeing, which is a radical act of self-determination in ableist and neoliberal capitalist society that demands time to tick to non-disabled ways of being and living.