Research failure, crip temporalities and bipolar time in UK higher education

In this article we propose an understanding of failure in academic research through the lens of cripped temporalities, outlining our original concept of ‘bipolar time’. Situated within the increasingly pressured context of UK higher education (UKHE), we move beyond literature that reframes failure as a step towards success. We foreground the affective experience of a (failed) empirical project exploring young LGBTAQ+ people’s engagement with TikTok, emphasising the painful reality of research failure, particularly for disabled academics. We argue that the ‘manic’ chrononormativity of UKHE, with its relentless demands for speed and productivity, connects and conflicts with the fluctuating and unpredictable realities of (disabled) academics’ lives. Building upon work on crip time, we propose the concept of ‘bipolar time’ to address the challenge of describing non-chrononormativity without reproducing rhythm as the organising principle of these other or broken times. Ultimately, bipolar time offers an original framework for understanding how time, illness and accelerating contexts construct the experience of failure. We conclude by calling for a radical acceptance of failure as something unavoidable, recognition that it will attach more readily and more frequently to minoritised and problematised groups and individuals, and – acknowledging that it hurts – as something which we need to routinely provide care to one another for.