This collaborative project is a materials-based intervention in healthcare practice and training spaces as well as academic spaces that both participate in defining and rely upon specific ideas related to the terms 'health' and 'care'. 

In Just Breathe, we are using familiar material items such as: hooded sweatshirts, business cards, and posters to invite and explore questions of value, integrity, and belonging in professionalized care settings. 

Each hoodie is printed with words inspired by a quote that aligns with our values in care spaces. Each quote is paired with a unique fragment of co-created work. Each hoodie is paired with a business card that is printed with a fragment of creative visual work that was collaboratively created.  The cards exist as invitations for those interested by the quote on the hoodie, and can also be quietly left in places of academic learning and healthcare spaces. 

Access is a practice of love.

"Access is a practice of love when it is done in service of care, solidarity, and disability justice" - Mia Mingus

We chose to print these words on our first hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations. 

Love as a political practice of accountability and transformation is central to the principles of disability justice. As Mia Mingus said, “disability justice is just another word for love.” We hold these values in places such as academic healthcare classrooms and labs, and physically wear these words, as a way to affirm our humanity and integrity in spaces dedicated to fixing bodies into normative forms. While the materiality of the clothing physically insulates our bodies, the sweatshirts also work as insulation in our values, particularly where these values hold space within a dominant paradigm that is not prepared to express those values. Forms of dominance in healthcare spaces that effectively co-opt the language of affirmation in order to (precisely, and specifically) eschew embodiment of the principle.

Disability is an art.

"Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity. Disability is an art. It's an ingenious way to live." - Neil Marcus

We chose to print these words on our second hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations. 

There is a prevailing idea that disability is something to be "accommodated". Disabled people are often required to contort, not only to find access for ourselves within dominant and dominating institutional spaces, but around the whole idea of being "deficient," "atypical," "less than" our normately-presumed peers. We are so often required to bend our ways around and through a centre that defines itself upon the idea of what we are not. We can resist in a rights-based way, and demand access to spaces that profit off the idea of us as problems to be solved and beings in need of cure -- those rights are important, that access is necessary and vital. Marcus' quote is an invitation to something more and other than the battleground of rights. Through it, we are interested in vitalizing inhabitations of resistance which take as central to our understanding of disability itself an aspect of human expression that is generous and generative in its being. Disability as uniquely creative, responsive, participatory, imaginative, and possible. An art of the living. An art beyond death.

Bend the clock.

"Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." - Alison Kafer

We chose this quote on our third hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations.

We want to open this project up to people who want to be in conversation with principles and practices of Disability Justice, and who are focusing on access currently. We want these workshops to orient around accessible print materials (tetrapak drypoint) and techniques, and support participants in having conversation and taking whatever steps they're on toward (co-)creating accessible spaces within their various spheres of responsibility, especially where those steps support broad access rather than continuing to imagine our collective responsibility to access as primarily accommodating folks in inaccessible spaces. In addition to the sorts of checklists that provide harm-reductive approaches to considering a more fulsome conceptualization of access (particularly in institutional spaces), we hope that songs and stories of crip time will hydrate and nourish our collective and individual imaginations. These workshops are imagined to invite people at all stages of this work, breaking out, where necessary into affinity groups related to participant relationship to and experience with enacting the principles of Disability Justice, and giving most weight to those in the room who inhabit crip/mad embodimindments.

Restless. Impatient. Continuing. Hopeful.

"Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." - Paulo Freire

We chose this quote on our fourth hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations.

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Choose both.

"I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both." - Angela Y Davis

We chose this quote on our fifth hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations.

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Wherever you are is where I want to be.

"Wherever you are is where I want to be." - Mia Mingus

We chose this quote on our sixth hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations.

<more here>