Conclusion: How to Inhabit the Time Machine with Disability

The conclusion returns to the notion of folding time and discusses how the present continues to disappear in the imperative of cure, habilitation, and rehabilitation. The imperative of cure functions as a time machine that seeks to take us to the past and to the future, times when the possibility of inhabiting the present with disability and illness is disallowed. When non-Western societies are discussed in Western academic contexts, coevalness is often denied or disability experiences are universalized across different cultural contexts. Cure needs to be reconsidered not as unequivocally beneficial and necessary or as limited to biomedical intervention, but as a set of political, moral, economic, emotional, and ambivalent transactions that occur in social relations. To rethink cure is to unfold the past, present, and future in order to recognize the presences of disabilities and create spaces for them.