• Date and time: Wednesday 14 May 2025, 3.30pm to 4.30pm
  • Location: Online only
  • Audience: Open to UoY Staff and Postgraduate Researchers
  • Admission: Free admission, booking required

Event details

Cripping Breath: Towards a new cultural politics of respiration is a five-year Wellcome Discovery Award project that centres the lives of people who have had their lives saved and sustained by ventilatory medical technologies.

The project brings together critical disability studies, medical sociology and humanities, science and technology studies, critical race studies and clinical practice to radically transform understandings of respiration and ventilation. In taking up the relative silences of breathing in and across these broad fields of study it asks: Where are the accounts and perspectives of ventilated people?

In order to answer this question, we are co-producing inquiry with our Community Researcher Cooperative - a team of community-based researchers, all of whom live on and with ventilatory technologies and respiratory illness, working across the project to embed lived and embodied knowledge into our theory-building and co-lead our inclusive approaches to inquiry (see Liddiard et al. 2023; Liddiard et al. 2022).

In our talk we share our experiences of co-production so far, outlining its power, politics and possibilities when wanting to position disability as the driving subject of inquiry. We also want to share the institutional and other barriers we are experiencing, to support other researchers who are navigating co-production and participatory approaches as ethical means to co-create knowledge in and with marginalised communities.

We will show how, in Cripping Breath, Artists-in-Residence, community researchers, disability and arts organisations and clinicians are working in collaboration, and sometimes in tension, with each other and the institution of the university, to curate and co-produce new understandings of the experiences of ventilated people.

To book your place, please respond to the calendar invite which will include the Zoom join link for this event. If you are not on the invitation and would like the zoom link please contact Edmund Coleman-Fountain at edmund.coleman-fountain@york.ac.uk.

About the speakers

  • Kirsty Liddiard is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education in the University of Sheffield.
  • Jen Kettle is a Research Associate with Cripping Breath.
  • Suzanne Glover is research manager at Pathfinders Neuromuscular Alliance and Lead Community Researcher on the project.

Contact

Edmund Coleman-Fountain