Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres by Lucy Sabin and Jorge Olcina Cantos | 11 March | 4pm (Johannesburg time)
WiSER and the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the University of London UCL warmly invite you to the second seminar of our new online seminar series
Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres
Lucy Sabin and Jorge Olcina Cantos will speak on
Weathering Saharan dust beyond the Spanish Meditarranean Basin:
A dialogue between climatology and postcolonial critical theories
Click here for paper
This interdisciplinary dialogue between climatology and cultural studies explores the phenomenon of “Saharan dust” that passes through and beyond the Spanish Mediterranean Basin. The dialogic process seeks to unearth the power relations within which weather stories and the authors are always already entangled, with a view to re-imagining weather writing and climatic storytelling in decolonial terms. Our parallel inquiries trace how origin stories, material mobilities, atmospheres, and environmental regulation work to codify the aeolian dust as an intrusion across borders. Drawing on critical theory, we argue that this weather “from” the Sahara Desert is othered in Eurocentric weather narratives, mapping onto geopolitical logic of “Fortress Europe”. Our research is instructed by postcolonial thought, political ecology, and the speculative feminist position of weathering. Through critical engagement with science in context, we dwell lastly on African air quality and experiences of weathering atmospheric dust further upwind. Our concluding comments speculatively drift with Mediterranean winds to animate a positionality of middleness.
Monday, 11th March 2024
4pm (Johannesburg time)
Register here
The series is convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall (WiSER) and Megan Vaughan (IAS).
Recent work on infrastructures, atmospheres and the biospheric shifts associated with conditions of the Anthropocene have relied on rendering newly vivid those aspects of the social which have long been treated as background. Sensory ecologies - affective or experienced space which compose environments, in Matthew Gandy’s terms, are synesthetic: like sounds, they reverberate within human and more-than-human subjects. Affective atmospheres are shared bodily situations, drawing also on renewed and shifting elemental understandings of air and refracted light. How can we come conceptually closer to the toxicities of both air pollution and rising authoritarianisms, to material and metaphoric atmospheres – and other less-than-visible carriers of damage? And to a better sense of the entanglements and relationalities that such modes of thought can produce? The growing non-transparency of air, in Sumana Roy’s terms, produces paranoid reading: suspicious, anticipatory theories of negative affect. This occurs in the context of the ‘disappearance of air’ in favour of mask filters, air purifiers and the AQI (Air Quality Index) for those who can afford it. Yet there may also be a reparative range to these questions: making air explicative might offer analytic opportunities for sustenance and responsiveness to what is to come.
The Series will run fortnightly on Mondays @ 4-5pm JHB time / 2-3pm London time. It will build on ongoing and emergent academic attention to air and atmospheres and draw out suggestions for future research and for ways of acting upon the contemporary air and atmospheric crisis, with a leading focus on global South contexts.