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.

Persist.

"The horrors persist and so do I." 

For our third hoodie, we chose to do an emergency drop—and this time, it’s publicly available.

There’s a long-running meme that echoes: “The horrors persist but so do I.” Here is a version of that meme's origin story if you are interested. It’s more than just a joke. It’s a refrain. A quiet, defiant survival instinct. A way of saying: we are still here.

We live inside overlapping catastrophes. The so-called “polycrisis” isn’t a future possibility—it’s our everyday context. The grief is real, and it’s constant. As with everything else in this project, we are not trying to offer easy answers or false hope. We do not pretend that persistence is triumph. But we believe in insulating witness— in naming what is happening, and in holding space for both resistance and heartbreak.

Decay serves a powerful function in ecology. Our experiments in gardening remind us that endings are not emptiness (heck, they remind us, even emptiness isn’t empty). Decay is part of a cycle—of breakdown, of rest, of generation, regeneration, and renewal.

We are not immune to collapse, but we are not made only of what is collapsing. We are rooted in something older, both celestial and terrestrial—something more stubborn. We outlast, not through denial, but through attunement. Through noticing. Through showing up in what is wrecked and what is beautiful and choosing (over and again) to feel, to make, to care. Survival is not passive. It is a practice. Like celebration. A fragile and furious kind of continuity.

This hoodie is not a solution. It’s a signal. A layer. A way of saying: we are still here.

A way of shielding the body while acknowledging the storm.

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 fourth hooded sweatshirt. The fourth, fifth, and sixth hoodies are part of the Killam-funded research study Just breathe: Cultivating an ecology of belonging through collaborative and concurrent art-making.

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 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.

Invention. Reinvention. 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 fifth hooded sweatshirt. The fourth, fifth, and sixth hoodies are part of the Killam-funded research study Just breathe: Cultivating an ecology of belonging through collaborative and concurrent art-making.

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 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. There are transactional norms of urgency baked into academic and health science training and practice spaces that determine who can participate within them and how, who belongs and who does not. These norms serve to reify ideas of standards and processes of standardization that function as barriers to access. Friere's words remind us that the work of inquiry is a much broader, longer, and relational process. Disability Justice invites us to participate differently in the conversation about standards and standardization. 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.

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 sixth hooded sweatshirt. The fourth, fifth, and sixth hoodies are part of the Killam-funded research study Just breathe: Cultivating an ecology of belonging through collaborative and concurrent art-making.

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 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. Contradiction calls our attention to conflict. We wonder what it is to sustain ourselves and others in the presence of contradictory tension. We wonder how to veer clear of the seductive idea that we can simply erase one system and replace it with another preferred system. When held in conversation with Disability Justice, we wonder about the trajectories of generative possibility that may open when we practice contradiction without collapsing to either/or, or rushing to compromise. We wonder what it is to actually, actively choose both. 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.

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 seventh hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations.

This quote carries with it an invitation to warmth and intimacy. Something of hearth, something of heart. Something of the nourishment, the labour and love of preparing and sharing food. And we wonder about what it is to bring that feeling into small group gathering. There is also an invitation to the glow of longing. On November 14, 2025, beloved community member (and fierce community leader) Alice Wong died. This hoodie, these words by Mia Mingus, there is something of what it is to know, viscerally, how unlikely life itself is, how short it is, how -- even if we do nothing but love on our beloveds every waking moment (and, let's face it, who actually does that?) -- just how few chances we have to live in love. 

In her public writing, Mia Minugs had this to say to Alice Wong:

I am so grateful that I got to know you for so long. One of the things I’ll remember most about you was how you gave your love away so freely to those you cared about. You just gave. You just kept showing up and reaching out. You just loved.

Just before I said goodbye to you that day in the DCC courtyard, I noticed a pristine white feather suspended between the lush branches of a small tree. Its quill was stuck to a spider web and it was softly turning back and forth. It was magical—mystical, even. I looked up at the small patch of sky framed by the floors stretching above and marveled at the feather. A tiny miracle. Like our paths crossing. Like you.

There is something of that feather to be found here, too.

We think to the people closest to us, alive, and dead, all of us differently dying. There is something of remembrance here, too.