Vol. 15 no. 2 (2025)

The Relevance of Kairotic Spaces in the Musicology Classroom

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It always begins with the same question: Is it me, or is it them? . . . The question emerges every time I drop a conversation, stammer while teaching, flap or tic or do otherwise pathological things with my hands. Midday, I will find myself sitting on a bathroom floor, crying, wondering if people like me just aren’t meant for this job, if people like me really do belong in institutions, if people like me should even exist. Is it me?

M. Remi Yergeau, “Reason”

While attending a recent pedagogy workshop on disability in the classroom, a fellow participant asked the facilitator what single, easily implementable change could have the greatest impact on disabled students. I imagine that there are as many possible answers to this question as there are instructors who could answer it. In this roundtable contribution––which might be taken as my own response to the question––I am interested in identifying an intervention that originates from discourses around invisible disabilities. Educators frequently assume (often correctly) that the work required to create an accessible classroom environment, course, or syllabus entails extra labor that falls to the instructor of record. The workshop participant’s use of the word “easily” in their question betrays an undeniable truth: Accessibility work is neither fairly compensated nor widely understood as the essential labor it is. This uncompensated, yet vital form of labor underpins the tension that I write from—that of minimizing undue extra labor from instructors and maximizing the access possible from any given intervention. What follows does not advocate for a concrete action or suggest a specific strategy but rather explores “kairotic spaces,” theorized by rhetoric and disability-studies scholar Margaret Price, as a productive lens for understanding the shifting nature of accessibility that emerges from disabled embodiment and enmindment in the classroom.

Moving Barriers and Moving Bodies

While multiple disability scholars have suggested that accessibility is a moving target, the classroom accommodation process as it stands today is often perceived as fixed and definite. This does not match the lived experience of disabled people, whose bodies and minds may not operate according to rigid schedules of supposed (dis)function. Instead, as Alison Kafer suggests in Feminist, Queer, Crip, disability is something that can be experienced, often primarily, in and through relationships. Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s conception of assemblages, Kafer argues that markers of disability function as contested domains and that disability can only be defined in relation to normativity. As she explains, “not only does disability exist in relation to able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, such that disabled and abled form a constitutive binary. . . . Disability is experienced in and through relationships; it does not occur in isolation.”1 By accepting Kafer’s contention that disability inheres in relationships, it becomes clear that accessibility and accommodations are not navigated by the disabled student alone. Rather than being a singular modification to the syllabus or course policies, accessibility becomes a relational process that is navigated by the instructor and students alike.

The epigraph that opens this essay identifies a central question that pervades my own experience of navigating the academy while being disabled: “Is it me?” This is the question that disabled people (and especially neurodivergent people) ask themselves when they request an accommodation. Personally, whenever accommodations are brought up, I remember my first-ever meeting with a student disability-services office: I explained the troubles I had experienced navigating social expectations and power dynamics in my performance studio, and the office offered me extra time to complete my tests. I share this anecdote not to condemn a disability-services officer who was likely overworked and perplexed by the eccentricities of the conservatory in which I was enrolled, but rather to provide an example of the often ludicrous accommodations that are proposed to disabled people. To state the obvious, extra time on tests would not have helped me navigate the complexities of the performance studio, nor the fraught negotiations among professor, student, and accommodations office that systems of higher learning often require. Instead, the process presented to me by the administrator encapsulated, in miniature, the difficulties I was experiencing. I feared confirmation that it was in fact “me” and my personal failings that were the true cause of my difficulties, and that needing accommodations was a symptom not of my disability but of my “laziness.”

As I write this essay, I wonder how my accommodation-seeking experience might have been different had I understood that I was not alone in the accommodations process, and that it was a goal of my instructors to help me succeed in their course. This is where Universal Design for Learning (UDL) closely aligns with disability theorists’ arguments for accommodations and accessibility as a shared experience between instructor and student. On its website, CAST, or the Center for Applied Special Technology, proudly proclaims that “UDL aims to change the design of the environment rather than to situate the problem as a perceived deficit within the learner. When environments are intentionally designed to reduce barriers, every learner can engage in rigorous, meaningful learning.”2 The web page continues by acknowledging that “designing learning environments that support learner agency requires continually examining the relationship between educators and students.”3

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However, as Jay Dolmage cautions in Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, UDL is not, in itself, a comprehensive reform of academic life nor an all-in-one solution to accessibility. Rather, Dolmage argues that the neoliberal university has hollowed out UDL’s subversive potential and practical utility. In this light, UDL might be understood as an instance of Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” a condition in which one’s object of desire ultimately obstructs one’s own flourishing.4 Dolmage is therefore careful to “present [UDL] not as a grand solution that can be neatly packaged, but in fact as a variety of teaching strategies, each of which might be a good solution in the classroom.”5 He elaborates that the classroom should serve as a space where a diversity of access needs engage one another, grounded in the understanding that “teachers have a responsibility to interrogate all spaces and all interfaces, as well as to share this responsibility equally with our students. As students and teachers critique spaces and interfaces, lessons from disability studies offer ways to prioritize and to value disability, while developing the critical tools to intervene in the production of cultural space.”6

To identify elements of disability studies that hold pedagogical potential, I turn now to the work of rhetoric and disability-studies scholar Margaret Price, whose extensive research on disabled academics and wide-ranging theorization of disability culture within the academy have been foundational to my own pedagogy.

Conavigating Kairotic Spaces

According to Price, kairotic spaces are “the less formal, often unnoticed, areas of academe where knowledge is produced and power is exchanged.”7 They are distinguished by five factors that include all or most of the following:

  • Real-time unfolding of events
  • Impromptu communication required or encouraged
  • Participants that are tele/present
  • Strong social element
  • High stakes8

In Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Price uses the framework of kairotic space to analyze pedagogical texts about common metrics of academic performance like class attendance, participation, and what she terms resistance (the way a student’s behavior provides either helpful or unhelpful pedagogical friction to a classroom).9 In this analysis, along with her own experience as an instructor, Price draws upon testimonies from students with mental disabilities to demonstrate that student experiences of such commonplace classroom practices are far from uniform. Indeed, Price’s research demonstrates that prevailing measures of classroom engagement are predicated on the assumption of a stable and knowable bodymind, one that frequently marginalizes professors and students with disabilities.

This situation is exacerbated by the fact that these same disabled students might be uncomfortable or unable to ask for help given the social pressures that come from seeking accommodations in the classroom. As Kimber Barber-Fendley and Chris Hamel argue, accommodations force upon those seeking them a duality according to which a disabled person either experiences disclosure or inaccessibility.10 It is not a leap, then, to acknowledge that what Price describes as the key element of kairotic spaces, the “pairing of spontaneity with high levels of professional/academic impact,” is significantly heightened upon the disclosure of disability and making a request for support. As Price concludes, “the students with mental disabilities are among those who may be least able to ‘share’ such information. . . . My answer is both a suggestion and a disclaimer: We can open as many different channels of communication as possible, in hopes that at least one will be accessible enough for a given student to use it.”11 In accordance with this theorization, Price provides seven suggestions for ways instructors can modify their own pedagogical strategies:

  • Focus on what’s feasible
  • Map the class explicitly
  • Provide direct instruction for participation
  • Experiment with multiple channels of feedback
  • Incorporate mental disability into approaches to disability
  • Make use of “safe houses”12
  • Understand that you will not be able to fully meet every student’s style and needs13

Not surprisingly, Price’s suggestions coalesce around initiatives that involve the instructor’s active participation in dismantling kairotic spaces. Offering an anecdote about a student whose classroom participation on the first day of the semester led her to anticipate a difficult teaching experience, Price explains how her perspective soon shifted: “Important to notice here is the shifting location of [the] problem: my observations of the student during our first class led me to assume she would be a ‘problem,’ but after she spoke to me, I realized that my perception of her actions was, in fact, the problem.”14 This quite radical shift is in line with Dolmage’s larger thesis in Academic Ableism—that we instructors are complicit in an academic system that itself disables students by the very nature of the institution.15 The question, then, is whether we as instructors are prepared to take up what Price calls “microrebellions,” those gestures that “get beyond the inside/outside notions of systems and houses to recognize that academic discourse is always already composed through and by the deviant. We—the ‘mad, bad, and sad’ (Snelgrove)—are in the academy already, few and stigmatized and silenced as we may be.”16 Guided by this framework, I now turn toward the musicology classroom to advocate for disability studies as an indispensable lens through which musicologists might reimagine their pedagogical practices.

Musical Kairotic Space

I will never forget the first time that I read the words “music” and “disability studies” together. It was in a music theory seminar with a professor who had assigned Joseph Straus’s “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory,” which opens with the sentence, “Disability is a pervasive and permanent aspect of the human condition.”17 Truly, that one sentence altered the trajectory of my life. At the time, I remember being relatively dismissive of Straus’s claim and paid little attention to its implications. A few months later, though, I began to have trouble playing my instrument. I realized that I couldn’t recall the last time I felt my hands, and I began to develop a series of issues related to chronic pain in my back and neck that continues to this day. I share this experience because without this exposure to disability studies, I wouldn’t have had a theoretical framework to comprehend what was happening to my body.18 While the inclusion of this article on the professor’s syllabus was coincidental, it nonetheless highlights an important reality: For musicologists teaching in conservatories and schools of music, our courses may offer one of the few opportunities for music majors to engage with disability theory during their undergraduate education. The necessity of this kind of pedagogical intervention is well acknowledged by disability scholars who work in English-literature pedagogy, and the stakes are only magnified at a music school where a very specific kind of physical embodiment is paramount to students’ success.19

With this in mind, I want to consider what forms of access might present themselves when we understand access as a collaborative process between student and instructor. Obviously, the feasibility of such an approach varies across classroom contexts. Still, music as a discipline offers many analogies for collaboration as a means of creating something cohesive and, ideally, harmonious. A chamber music coach once told me that the two golden rules of ensemble playing are simple: If you need help, ask for it; if you are asked for help, give it. That ethos provides a powerful model for beginning conversations about accessibility and accommodations. I use it to frame my discussions with students about access, explaining that my goal is for them to have a learning experience that is as engaging and fulfilling as they want it to be.

I emphasize that such initial discussions with students may or may not prove successful. Thus I model my pedagogy on musical practice itself—a continual process of experimentation in which some ideas succeed and others do not, but all contribute to better outcomes over time. This process requires vulnerability and transparency between student and instructor, and I realize the emotional labor it demands. Yet approaching access collaboratively allows for a more meaningful and resilient form of accessibility than ad hoc accommodations premised on fixed notions of embodiment or enmindment that are static for an entire term.

Returning to the question with which I began, I believe that the most immediate and impactful change we can make as educators is to signal our openness and willingness to work with students on the shared project of accessibility. In doing so, we inevitably navigate a kairotic space—but one that has abundant musical precedent.

  1. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013), 8.↗
  2. CAST, “The Goal of UDL: Learner Agency,” Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0, last updated 2024, https://udlguidelines.cast.org/more/udl-goal/ (bold original).↗
  3. CAST.↗
  4. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press), 2011.↗
  5. Jay T. Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (University of Michigan Press, 2017), 151.↗
  6. Dolmage, 130.↗
  7. Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (University of Michigan Press, 2011), 21.↗
  8. Margaret Price “Defining Kairotic Space,” in “Multimodality in Motion: Disability & Kairotic Spaces,” Kairos 18, no. 1 (2013): https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/pages/space/defining.html. This is an updated definition from that which appears in Mad at School. For the original list, see Price, Mad at School, 61.↗
  9. Price, Mad at School, 79.↗
  10. Kimber Barber-Fendley and Chris Hamel, “A New Visibility: An Argument for Alternative Assistance Writing Programs for Students with Learning Disabilities,” College Composition & Communication 55, no. 3 (2004): 504–35, https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc20042764.↗
  11. Price, Mad at School, 89.↗
  12. Price is referring to a concept developed by Mary Louise Pratt which describes “social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, [and] temporary protection from legacies of oppression.” Quoted in Price, 100. For the source article, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40.↗
  13. Price, 89–102.↗
  14. Price, 91 (emphasis original).↗
  15. Dolmage, Academic Ableism.↗
  16. Price, Mad at School, 86–87.↗
  17. Joseph N. Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 1 (2006): 113.↗
  18. I share a similar sentiment to William Cheng’s rationale for including the methodologies of autoethnography and personal anecdote as a part of my scholarship. See Cheng’s Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), 26.↗
  19. For one such example, see M. Remi Yergeau et al., “Multimodality in Motion: Disability & Kairotic Spaces,” Kairos 18, no. 1 (2013), https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/index.html.↗

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