Symposium ~ Crip Time | Emma Holten, Margaret Price, Jessica Holmes, and Anne Kølbæk Iversen

The symposium Crip Time addresses questions related to experiences and understandings of impairment, access, and care. Through presentations and conversations the symposium asks how we represent and talk about illness, vulnerability and non-normative experiences without reducing these to sensational or stigmatizing language. Taking the exhibition IN PROTEST AND IN CARE on show at O—Overgaden as a point of reference it is also a moment to reflect upon artistic articulations as ways to develop new languages, repertoires, and collectives in a movement towards accountability and curiosity.

The symposium is part of Anne Kølbæk Iversen’s three-year postdoctoral project Crip Time: Art of Impairment, Withdrawal, and Impatience (2024–27), hosted by O—Overgaden and the University of Copenhagen with support from the New Carlsberg Foundation.

In this conversation, author Emma Holten and curator Anne Kølbæk Iversen will talk about the dynamics of care and needs for cripping time. Talking artworks from the exhibition IN PROTEST AND IN CARE as points of departure, the conversation will discuss artistic articulations of withdrawal and impatience in relation to disabling infrastructures.

Emma Holten (b. 1991) is an author and speaker. Since 2018, she has worked with feminist economics. In 2024 she published her first book DEFICIT - On the value of care in Danish. It is available in English, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, Italian, French, and Finnish – and forthcoming in 6 other languages. It has won the Politiken Literature Prize, The Library Reader’s Prize, The Sara Danius Prize, The Sprout Prize and was shortlisted for the Montana Literature Award.

Anne Kølbæk Iversen, PhD, is a researcher, curator, editor, and writer based in Copenhagen. She holds a position as Head of Education and Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and has recently conducted the research project Crip Time: Art of Impairment, Withdrawal, and Impatience in a collaboration between O—Overgaden - Institute of Contemporary Art and the University of Copenhagen, funded by the New Carlsberg Foundation.

In this talk, Dr. Margaret Price (she/they) argues that sustainable access requires a commitment to collective care and accountability. Drawing upon her award-winning books Mad at School and Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life, Price shares findings based on a survey and interview study of more than 300 disabled faculty and staff members at colleges and universities. Their talk focuses particularly on the concept of “accompaniment,” which refers to relations between humans, objects, technologies, spaces, and animals. Price closes with a discussion of accountability and gathering, emphasizing the need for collectivity in order to find more sustainable and restorative ways of moving together.

Dr. Margaret Price (she/they) is Professor of English (Writing, Rhetoric & Literacy) at The Ohio State University, where they also serve as Director of the Disability Studies Program. She is the author of the award-winning books Crip Spacetime (Duke University Press, 2024; open-source) and Mad at School (University of Michigan Press, 2011). In 2022, they worked at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, on a Fulbright Research Grant. Margaret is now at work on a project focused on cognitive disability, gathering, and collective access.

Using my forthcoming book Music at the Margins of Sense as my point of departure, my talk details and contests several prevailing misconceptions associated with deafness in Western music discourse by taking stock of the diverse musical experiences of deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing disabled musicians. Through surveying a range of examples including the creative practice of sound artist Christine Sun Kim, all-deaf electronic dance music raves, the musical endeavours of hearing aid users, and music devised to mitigate tinnitus, I offer a reappraisal of sensory experience that defies naturalized perceptual processes and normative auditory thresholds, the idealization of sonic fidelity, and biologically driven conceptions of musicality. In so doing, I ultimately champion a multisensory, multimodal conception of musicianship that embraces the lived experience of disability as a vital locus of musical creativity and expertise.

Jessica Holmes is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen. Her scholarship addresses the relationship between music and disability with emphasis on embodiment, vocality, and identity formation. Her talk today draws from her first book, Music at the Margins of Sense (University of Michigan Press, November 2026). Also under contract with Michigan, her second book, The Musical Vernacular of Depression, examines the aestheticization of mental health in contemporary Anglo-American pop music. Her peer-reviewed articles appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, among other venues.

This event requires a ticket and costs 75 DKK. Find tickets here.

The building has a rear entrance with a ramp via Port B from Frue Plads. There is also an elevator in the library that provides access to the first floor and to the accessible restroom in the basement.

The symposium will be held in English.