Cripping Breath: Towards a new cultural politics of respiration

People who depend on ventilators to breathe are leading a new research project that rethinks what respiration means in a society shaped by a global pandemic. This matters because the COVID-19 pandemic thrust respiratory failure and mechanical ventilation into public consciousness, yet the voices of disabled and chronically ill people who rely on these technologies have been largely absent from academic and cultural discussions about breathing. The project fills a gap: it treats the lived experiences of ventilated people not as medical case studies but as sources of knowledge about living with compromised respiration in a pandemic world. If successful, the research could reshape how healthcare systems, policymakers, and the public understand ventilation and respiratory illness. It may influence how hospitals communicate with ventilated patients, how disability organisations advocate for respiratory care, and how cultural narratives around breathing—from public health messaging to art and media—include perspectives from those who breathe with machines. The project uses arts, archives, and ethnography, working with artists-in-residence and clinicians to coproduce new understandings. This is primarily a humanities and social science project; it will not develop new medical devices or treatments, but it could change the cultural and political frameworks that quietly shape who gets ventilated, how they are treated, and what post-pandemic futures are imagined.