Paper short abstract:

This paper is a reflection on forms of care emerging in collaborative research practices that begin with the breath. It describes elements of workshop/residency, the welcome presence of our families, and the care work and commitments that shaped the atmosphere of our collaboration.

Paper long abstract:

"Weathering the Forest: Boundaries, Atmosphere, Breath" is a reflection on forms of care emerging in collaborative research practice and artworks that begin with the breath. Conceptualising weather/ing and transcorporeality through the breath, as ways into collaborative processes with the more-than-human world, and each other, it seeks to animate perceptual experiences and perspectives of ecological transition(s); attempts to encompass and 'hold space' for care-full, caring, diverse perspectives, collective relationships. It describes research workshops with the same name, conducted in 2022 and 2023 - in the context of debates about and interventions into energy transition, de-, re-, and afforestation, and landscape 'futures' in Scotland, taking place in forested and farmed landscapes. From a feminist perspective, the paper describes elements of workshop/residency, including the welcome presence of our families, children, and the care work and commitments that shaped the atmosphere of our collaborations and experience. This multimodal presentation weaves together text, imagery, and sounds, the complexities of human-more-than-human atmospheres, central to which are the concepts of transcorporeality and 'weathering'. It offers an accompanying moving image work (in progress!) exploring these ecological imaginaries, and an expanded, multisensory understanding of human-environment relations that begin with breath. The paper contextualises these examples through discussion of embodied and performative methodologies that aim to foster closer, more empathetic connections with living landscapes.

Paper short abstract:

By thinking forest fires as affective atmospheres, this presentation is guided by the question of how creative writing might help affected persons to work through environmentally induced distress in a sensitive, embodied and creative way.

Paper long abstract:

There is a porosity between bodies and their surroundings, and just as people's homes can catch fire, so can their feelings. Forest fires, therefore, emerge as part of a rapidly changing earth atmosphere, and simultaneously as part of a collectively sensed, social, affective atmosphere. Individuals and communities affected by such disasters often experience a sense of loss, grief, powerlessness and trauma in relation to their experiences. In an uncanny way, a fire can keep on burning inside the mind, so to speak, a condition that can have long-term consequences for the mental health and psychosocial well-being of the affected community. This project, therefore, is guided by the question of how these shared emotional atmospheres can be embraced by taking up the healing power of poetry, and how creative writing could help affected persons to work through environmentally induced distress in a sensitive, embodied and creative way. The ability to name one's ecological emotions and articulate them through writing is an important step in processing what has happened and bringing to the surface thoughts and memories that have been diffuse or repressed in everyday life. Furthermore, the creative and shared work of composing a poem and the opportunity to take home a tangible result afterwards strengthens the resilience of individuals and communities. By juxtaposing ethnographic material from my own fieldwork with recent research done in fields related to eco-anxiety, this presentation will experiment with the possibilities of using poetry as a method for community engagement in the aftermath of forest fires.

Paper short abstract:

In Jerusalem rain galvanises multiple forms of care, none of which are neutral. When water falls from the sky it inspires urban designs entwining with political violence, radical politics in plans for floods, and dances for liberation. If rain ushers in new arrangements, what potential do they hold?

Paper long abstract:

For centuries in Jerusalem its residents have looked up to the sky for rain. A signal for good harvests and health in the year ahead, falls from the heavens augured hope or precarity with the swelling of pools, wells, and karstic springs. Now, rain entwines with the extremes and small intimacies of life under political violence, just as its patterns become more unpredictable every year. In the moments of the everyday, while floods bypass blockades and devastate displacement in Gaza, the political systems which govern rains here are at work across the city of Jerusalem. Regulations from the state control the capture of rain with claims of care, urban designs for municipal ecosystem services obscure effects of Palestinian dispossession, and plans for floods beyond city borders elicit radical politics articulated through care. Before it touches the land, though, rain remains free. Palestinian Jerusalemites tend to rainfed garden plots, embrace the showers of a new season, and look up to the sky for signs of sacred hope. Amongst these rains, forms of care displace, refuse, and subvert one another. Never taking care and its politics for granted, Jerusalem rain unsettles and regenerates infrastructural, state, and daily practices in the Palestine Anthropocene. In this work I draw on my doctoral research in Jerusalem and collaborative projects which have emerged since. Where rain ushers in new political and ecological arrangements, what power do these wield? If atmospheric matter inspires an ecology of care, what are its limits and what potential does it hold?

Paper short abstract:

The dry-stone walling infrastructures of the Guadarrama Mountains are related to diffuse processes of care and territorial custody capable of shaping unexpected microclimatic situations and complex more-than-human entanglements.

Paper long abstract:

I will discuss certain human-atmospheric entanglements expressed by a socio-ecological cycle characteristic of the territorial dry-stone infrastructures in the Guadarrama Mountains (Segovia, Spain).

The dry-stone walling enclosures are based on placing and balancing stones (previously accumulated as residues from agricultural fields) without the use of mortar. These are both collective and private infrastructures, and they are highly flexible and permeable. Flexible, because anyone (human and more-than-human) can easily intervene by adding or removing stones. Permeable, because the open joints (between the stones) allow the passage of all kinds of flows (such as water and wind) and beings (roots, invertebrates, reptiles, rodents, etc.). Moreover, moisture tends to accumulate constantly in the shady and ventilated cavities, which contributes to the reduction of the ambient temperature and to colonisation by lichens, mosses, and seeds. In this dialectic, the anthropic gaps become more-than-human habitats, and the vegetation (thorny hedgerows in many cases) is part of the human function of enclosure. Once colonized, the enclosures form ecological corridors of enormous biodiversity, as well as extensive and resilient agro-silvopastoral 'bocage' systems. These dry-stone systems have demonstrated the ability to create their own microclimatic conditions, offering a method to counteract the local atmospheric impacts of global warming.

All this, however, depends on a subtle exercise of collective territorial care and custody by the local population. Maintaining enclosures (both one's own and others') requires a daily ethical commitment: rebuilding the walls time and again, but also allowing the vegetation to grow and adapt.

Paper short abstract:

There is growing awareness of how the practices of medicine and global health produce atmospheric phenomena that undermine the possibility of good health. I draw on research of interventions to decarbonise the UK’s NHS service to open up the ‘ecologies of support’ that constitute health care.

Paper long abstract:

Atmospheric phenomena like airborne pollutants, allergens and viruses have highlighted the social, political, and ecological conditions that produce vulnerability to exposure and harm. It is increasingly common for the scientific literature to talk of co-exposures because atmospheric phenomena do not act in isolation. Thinking across atmospheric phenomena forces a recognition of the powerful historical and political processes that produce exposures and their uneven distribution.

In this paper I explore the socio-material and political relations of atmospheric phenomena in health care. In recent years there has been a growing awareness of how the practices of medicine and global health undermine the possibility of good health. For instance, a 2018 report by Asthma and Lung UK showed that more than 2000 health centres across the UK exceed WHO’s safe air pollution limits. Considering this evidence, and the recent involvement of health care practitioners in climate policy, I draw on preliminary research of a programme of work to decarbonise the UK’s NHS service. The programme involves developing local, engaged, experimental and situated interventions to reduce emissions and exposures on workers, patients, publics, and the planet. Together these various attempts to achieve more sustainable forms of health speak to the collective project of planetary health. Specifically, they foreground the ‘ecologies of support’ that constitute health in ways that also trouble it. I conclude by offering ways to open-up these interventions as potential sites for fostering an atmospheric care practice.

Paper short abstract:

In the context of Japanese summer heatwaves, I explore the case of an informal attempt to track atmospheric temperature in a park affected by tree felling. I argue that measuring temperature becomes a bodily sensorial way to attune to heat’s elusiveness and a daily practice of atmospheric care.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decade, despite existing guidelines addressing heat adaptation through enhancing greenery in Fukuoka, several trees have been felled, and urban temperatures have reached new records. In this context, septuagenarian Shiho decided to measure the outdoor temperature for 62 hot summer days in ten spots where trees were cut down in Fukuoka’s Ohori Park, annotating remarks about plants and animals’ conditions.

In this paper, I will focus on the encounter with Shiho, whom I met during my 8-months fieldwork in Fukuoka, to show how measuring temperature becomes a way to attune to the elusiveness of heat and is ultimately an act of care mediated by the atmospheric.

Drawing on discussions in anthropology on care in the Anthropocene (Puig, 2012; Van Dooren 2017; Choy, 2018), I argue that the action of going out in the scorching heat and measuring temperature in an imperfect and DIY way is not a mere translation or stabilisation of heat’s elusiveness but is a technique to notice, elicit, and bodily attune to the atmospheric. Moreover, through daily exposure and habituation to heat, Shiho unravelled more-than-human relations - disentangled because of anthropogenic atmospheric extremes - and created a daily practice of atmospheric care. Focusing on Puig’s remark that care entails practical labour, I will bring forward how Shiho’s acts of care implied sensorial labour to fall into step with thermoregulating her body, calibrating measuring devices, and attuning to more-than-human altered habits in order to attend to the park she has been living near whole her life.

Paper short abstract:

I focus on practices of (atmospheric) care by two humans and a dog experiencing homelessness in Las Vegas, discuss their exposure to heat as environmental violence and being governed with climate, and suggest doing anthropology in the patchy Anthropocene as a co-crafting of ecologies of support.

Paper long abstract:

Being set up in a desert at a spot where water can be made accessible, heat has been present in the city of Las Vegas from the very beginning of its settler-colonial history. On the one hand, aiming at undoing its elemental condition, Vegas has been inventing itself as a patchwork of indoor atmospheres providing entertainment and adventure, as well as shelter and escape from climatic and other realities. On the other hand, the city has one of the highest homeless populations in the US, and for them, the entrance to the ‘air-conditioned cowboy’ (Al 2017) is prohibited. This paper pays attention to the practices of weathering (the heat of) Vegas by an entanglement of two humans and a dog experiencing homelessness. Thinking with Starosielski (2021), I understand the structural limitation of their access to shade, water, and cooled-down places as environmental ‘thermal violence’ and a form of being governed with/through climate. The paper unfolds the entanglement's creative and subversive practices of modulating their atmospheric envelope (McCormack 2018) by enmeshing themselves in ‘ecologies of support’ (Duclos & Sánchez Criado 2020) while claiming and negotiating public space. Building on the notion of care as a relational form of labor with a speculative feature (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), I discuss these practices as multispecies atmospheric care. Finally, I suggest doing anthropology in the patchy Anthropocene as the co-crafting of ecologies of support.

Paper short abstract:

Shady landscapes have become relevant in plans for urban heat mitigation. Together with discussing fieldwork on Barcelona's municipal shade prototypes, I introduce the ‘Department of Umbrology’ (https://umbrology.org/): a collective experiment to explore their atmospheric care configurations.

Paper long abstract:

The sun is usually considered a provider of conditions of life on Earth, but what to do when it damages us or puts us at risk, such as in atmospheric conditions of extreme heat? In the midst of splintering climate mutations, growing environmental concerns have caused administrations and design professionals to recover a daily atmospheric relation with an old acquaintance of us earthlings: shades. Even if it might seem unimportant – there is nothing more conventional than shades – these everyday dynamic atmospheric relations with the sun as it passes through our habitats have gained relevance in urban heat mitigation solutions, such as shade plans, bioclimatic itineraries, or green infrastructures. As part of recent ethnographic work following some of these municipal initiatives and developments in the city of Barcelona, I am studying the prototyping process of shady landscapes. This requires re-enlivening old knowledges and techniques of shades, as well as new configurations, searching to protect those more exposed to a deadly sun and its devastating effects. In a heated present, where the ability to shelter ourselves from the scorching sun is a poorly distributed good, vindicating the knowledge and generative practices of shades may be crucial. To this end, I discuss a collective speculative experiment I’m co-curating with Santiago Orrego, the ‘Department of Umbrology:’ a space where to prototype ethnographic devices unearthing the plural forms of inhabiting that these shady ecologies of support – be they existing or designed – might enable, as well as their configurations of atmospheric care.

Paper short abstract:

This paper brings ethnographic ‘homework’ with family memories and experiences together with efforts to ‘study up’ among climate modelers and experts. It suggests that thinking atmospherically might open up new ways of reading ethnographically across science, law, and relations of care.

Paper long abstract:

As concerns with climate harm and climate displacement increase in both popular discourse and policy-making spaces, a range of scientific, humanitarian, and legal practices have looked to define, model, understand, and legislate habitable environments. Initial studies emphasized changing environmental forces as they impacted specific people and places, ignoring the relational and social practices, including practices of care, through which habitability is made. Yet, increasingly, expert accounts and models of habitability are grappling not only with how climate forces shape material infrastructures and spaces but with how livelihoods, economies, and possibilities for intergenerational life may be shaped or interrupted by climatic change.

Thinking with Murphy’s concept of alterlife (2017) and related work on political and environmental atmospheres (eg. Ahmann 2023), this paper brings ethnographic ‘homework’ with family memories and experiences together with efforts to ‘study up’ among climate modelers and experts. It suggests that thinking atmospherically might open up – may even require – new ways of reading and working ethnographically across domains of science, the law, and family experiences and relations of care. Reading these ethnographic forms together can generate a disorienting slippage across geographic and temporal distance, but it can also open up new moments for tracing care and climate atmospherically in ways that challenge dominant expert (and sometimes activist) distinctions between Global North and Global South, past and present, ethnographer and subject.