The essay presents and develops the concept of “critical places” and how it can be used when studying the everyday experience of living with long-term sickness and/or disability. The concept analyses the duality of both physical risk and social benefit and how they can collide in one specific place and create a bodily situation where the individual needs to act. The concept of “critical places” explores the phenomenological thought about doing and happening in specific situations, and, as such, the concept can also be seen as an ethnographic method. As a more theoretical concept, “critical places” can be used for a hermeneutic analysis of risk-taking, hiding from stigma, identity formation, power relations in a specific place and so on. I have used the concept in a couple of Swedish text concerning disability, and in these texts the concept has been elaborated with theories from geographies.