Publications and reading

Atkinson, L., Hale, J. and Liddiard, K. (2024) 'Rethinking Crip time and embodiment in research', The Polyphony. Online. Available from here

• 'Cripping Breath: Towards a new cultural politics of respiration’ is a five-year co-produced project that centres the lives of people who use ventilatory medical technologies (Wellcome Discovery Award, 226472/Z/22/Z). As a diverse team of clinicians, artists, academics and others with lived and embodied experience of disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence, we are broadly exploring breathing and ventilation (e.g. forms of medical technology that support respiration) through arts-informed, archival, narrative and ethnographic research approaches. Cripping Breath aims to forge new understandings of respiration from Crip perspectives (see McRuer 2006), which unapologetically centre disability as a valued human experience. We aim to challenge breathing as an autonomous and natural function that is framed as central to our humanness and ability to live, the absence of which brings us close to death (see Solomon 2020). In this essay, members of the project team draw upon personal narratives and embodied experiences of respiratory failure and neurodivergence to think through crip time. Crip time (Kafer 2013: 27) refers to the relationships between disability and time.

Liddiard, K., Atkinson, L., Evans, K., Gibson, B., Goodley, D., Hale, J., Lawson, R., Runswick-Cole, K., Spurr, R., Vogelmann, E., Watts, L., Weiner, K., and Whitney-Mitchell, S. (2024) '“No-one’s contribution is more valid than another’s”: Committing to inclusive democratic methodologies', Research in Education: Democratic Methodologies in Education Research (Special Issue). Online first available here. 

• In this article, we explore the power and potential of democratic research methodologies in and beyond Critical Disability Studies research contexts. We centre two funded, co-produced, participatory and arts-informed projects that have been co-designed and co-led with disabled young people and people living with chronic (respiratory) illness. We critically explore some key processes, which we suggest can mitigate forms of disablism and ableism inherent to research processes which traditionally make them undemocratic spaces of inequity. Our article offers original analyses into the very notion of democratic research which have significant applications; driven as they are by the presence of disability. These include (i) Crip time - the recognition of (disabled) people’s need for ‘flex time’ (Kafer 2013); (ii) virtual methods and intimacies as routes to equity in research leadership; and (iii) flexible and slow/er research approaches. We also draw upon the ways in which the Covid-19 global pandemic has reshaped methodologies and approaches to inquiry. We advocate that, as research communities, we must come together to keep hold of these new inclusive and hybridised ways of relating and engaging in what are problematically framed as “post-Covid” times. We conclude by emphasising the importance of always committing to disrupting power dynamics through centring flexibility, accessibility and inclusivity across our inquiry with marginalised others.