Short Abstract

Thinking with air and wind, this panel explores turbulence, leakage, and drift as forces that cross scales and borders. It asks how atmospheric movements make resilience porous and open new ways of sensing justice and futures through ethnographic, theoretical, and multimodal approaches.

Description

Air moves, drifts and leaks, carrying matter and meaning. As it crosses scales and borders, it gathers and disperses, enveloping bodies, places, and planets in shifting currents. Alive with animacies, agencies, and atmospheres, it accumulates as dust, pollution, or turbulence, folding past exposures into present conditions and future projections.

This panel explores how wind’s instabilities might shape, unsettle, and open alternative imaginaries of resilience, justice, and relation. From breathing polluted air to sensing climatic shifts, air makes palpable the porosities of life. Recent scholarship has emphasised air as a medium of circulation — affective, toxic, meteorological — and wind as a force of turbulent intrusion and suspension, orienting speculation and design. From dust storms crossing continents to pollution drifting unevenly across neighborhoods, such flows expose how some lives and places bear heavier atmospheric burdens than others. Rather than framing resilience as containment or enclosure, these atmospheric dynamics invite us to contemplate porosity, leakage, and excess as conditions for future-making. We ask: How might attention to wind’s turbulence refigure resilience as openness to drift and transformation? What can leaks and drafts reveal about ways of dwelling with atmospheric inequalities and shifting relations? And how might creative practices tell stories of winds to come?

We invite contributions that engage with airs and winds through ethnographic, theoretical, and dialogic approaches, as well as multimodal forms such as poetry, performance, visual media, and sensing practices. Papers may, for example, trace meteorological infrastructures, follow how winds disrupt or redistribute everyday life, or engage activist and artistic efforts to narrate and contest air’s movements. In doing so, we seek to gather windstories that connect intimate and planetary scales, showing how attention to airs contributes to STS by bridging infrastructures and data with the affective, geosocial, and speculative dimensions of atmospheric life.

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