Crip Flexibility and Painful Analysis: Critical Disability Methodologies of Swedish Welfare State Austerity

This article contributes to methodological debates in critical disability studies (CDS) by introducing the concepts of crip flexibility and painful analysis to describe how disability research is shaped under austerity. Drawing on autoethnography and qualitative interviews with disabled people in Sweden, it analyzes how austerity politics and academic ableism contour the methodological and affective orientations of a disabled researcher. Crip flexibility names the situated negotiations of access, method, and fieldwork that emerge when research is conducted in conditions of structural inaccessibility, while painful analysis captures the emotional labor and cripistemological work of interpreting data when one’s own precarity is at stake. Grounded in the Swedish welfare state context, the article offers a distinct Nordic perspective to international CDS, showing how the production of disability knowledge is deeply entangled with welfare politics under austerity.