We Run Like Rivers

What might we discover if we follow the compass of crip navigation? A new direction and knowledge of place, scale, time, and energy?  What if we followed the lead of those who learn the contours of place from the way a wheel(chair) skids through stone, how it hangs suspended over the ridgeline of a rut; the way a crutch explores the texture of moss upon rock?  Those of us who reach for the ground through crutches as four legged creatures or who feel through wheels which trace the terrain like a trickle of water? Those who run like rivers?

We Run Like Rivers is a series of short audio works by disabled artist Claire Cunningham and disabled scholar Prof Julia Watts Belser. Designed for headphones (transcripts also available) Claire and Julia offer provocations around ideas of wilderness, terrain, time and energy from a disabled perspective, touching on themes of climate justice, crip expertise and the dynamics of climate denial.  Supported by musical arrangements from composer Matthias Herrmann, they ask how disability experience can inform creative ways of adapting to constraint, foster resilience amidst the realities of change and loss, and help us recognize and savor the precarious beauty of our world.