Suchergebnisse

This paper contributes to emerging theories of unbreathable space by showing how breathers with asthma engage environments and atmospheres as the substrate of their everyday lives. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than 80 asthma sufferers living in the United States, I show how nonpharmaceutical care practices are used to breathe in place. First, I argue that attunement operates as a labor of care that engages with and creates the substrate of everyday life. Next, I describe a range of emplacement tactics that breathers use to navigate atmospheres and environments that are potentially risky, or that immediately produce asthma symptoms. Emplaced care involves situating oneself in ways that protect the breathing body within the sociomaterial spaces of everyday life. Finally, people with asthma are orientated differently than other breathers who may share the same atmosphere, but are not pathologically sensitized to it. These narratives of asthma care lend insight into emergent atmospheric politics by showing how differently attuned breathers care through environments by isolating, distancing, and barricading themselves from the world and others.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space