Walking Interconnections: Performing conversations of sustainability

A summary of a recent research project exploring disability, sustainability and resilience.

Walking Interconnections: Performing Conversations of Sustainability

Walking Interconnections is a research project that recognises and responds to the fact that disabled people’s voices have been largely absent from the sustainability debate. Representing one-fifth of the world’s population, disabled people have unique contributions, often overlooked, to help build resilient societies and communities. Setting as its foundational tenet the fact that disability does not mean inability, Walking Interconnections uses ‘walking with’ as a way to identify and make visible the everyday, embodied knowledges of disabled people – their habitual experiences of their environments and their persistent enactments of resilience within these.

In this short paper, Dee Heddon shares some of the findings from the project, revealing frequent performances of preparation, creativity, persistence and, especially significant to the context of environmental sustainability, interdependency.