Cripping Breath: Towards a New Cultural Politics of Respiration
The Florence Nightingale Museum is delighted to be hosting an upcoming exhibition from Cripping Breath: Towards a New Cultural Politics of Respiration. This 5 year programme of research funded by a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award is based at the University of Sheffield. The exhibition a combines insights from across the project, featuring narrative, archival and historical approaches to respiratory illness and mechanical ventilation.
What is the Cripping Breath project?
The Cripping Breath teams says:
“Covid-19, global climate crises, and more recently energy and cost of living crises, emphasise the need for urgent new understandings of the politics, processes and prioritisation of respiration and breathing. The sudden emergence of global respiratory disease in the form of the pandemic has reshaped our social, cultural, and political worlds and experiences of health and illness.
Importantly, Cripping Breath centres the lives of people living with respiratory illness, and who have had their lives saved and sustained by ventilatory medical technologies. Our explorations – led by disabled and chronically ill people who live on ventilation – do so in recognition that these growing communities of people and patients are often absent from contemporary health research.
As such, at the heart of our inquiry is our Community Researcher Cooperative, a group of people with lived experience of ventilation, who now work with us as researchers on the project. Community researchers’ experience and knowledge is vital to how we co-create new approaches to health research and understand the everyday realities of respiratory illness. Community researchers have described this as an opportunity to ‘help others and share our experiences together’ and as ‘something flexible for me to do from my own home and my own bed’. We focus on what matters to us as a cooperative, and practice accessible, inclusive co-produced research designed for disabled and ventilated bodies.
Centring different kinds of ways of understanding respiratory illness, including working through the arts, theatre, storytelling, exploring archives, and working with patients and clinicians in the NHS, our project develops Crip perspectives – forms of knowledge production that emerge from lived experiences of disability and chronic illness. In Cripping Breath, academics, artists and clinicians embody this way of working, developing creative, critical approaches shaped by personal and professional experience. Ultimately, we are working in collaboration to create new understandings of respiratory illness and ventilation, and at the same time are exploring a new cultural politics of respiration in a continuing global pandemic, and as we imagine post-pandemic futures.
In the exhibition, we want to share creative work from across the project. Included will be our archival researchers’ creative responses to explorations of breathing in the archives; participants’ photographs from our storytelling workshops on the everyday meanings of living on ventilation; and a real life version of our Museum of Breathing on Instagram. Come and explore with us as we ask some critical questions about the historical and contemporary contexts surrounding breathing and technology.”
