Short Abstract

The workshop gathers anthropological work on air pollution engaging with its materiality, sensorial and affective qualities, and the politics surrounding it. It aims to illuminate this global problem through its production and lived experience across different regional contexts.

Long Abstract

Air pollution has emerged as a pressing global environmental and public health issue, responsible for an estimated 7 million premature deaths annually and disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations. The composition of polluted air is not only a biophysical fact: it is tightly imbricated with infrastructural and environmental dynamics, cultural and affective regimes of breathing, and political and socio-economic landscapes in concrete locations. While air is vital and all around us, its materiality, elusiveness, and mobility make it difficult to grasp, measure, and manage.

Though air pollution is a global phenomenon, its effects are experienced unevenly across temporal, spatial, and social dimensions. The slow violence of air pollution can accumulate over time; or air pollution can be felt acutely in a sudden asthma attack. The material properties of air, together with urban form, topography, and weather dynamics, make some neighborhoods more polluted than others. At the same time, unequal access to infrastructures of measuring, filtering, or mitigating air pollution, as well as vulnerabilities to their effects, might intersect with existing social inequalities. How are these temporal, spatial and social dimensions of air pollution experienced, how are they mobilized in the politics of air pollution?

This workshop brings together anthropological research on air pollution that engages with its materiality, its sensorial and affective qualities, and the politics surrounding it. We are interested both in empirical research from different regional contexts around the world and in conceptual papers on air pollution and are looking forward to engaging discussions and anthropological takes on air pollution.