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Paper short abstract

Wildfire smoke alters bodies, atmospheres, infrastructures, and sociality alike. This paper draws on ongoing research within Canada to propose the concept of smokeworlds as a methodological sensitivity and theoretical approach to tracing smoke through its ephemeral and durable characteristics.

Paper long abstract

Climate change troubles everyday life. Not only does climate alter the mundane practices that (re)compose quotidian life (Hulme, 2009), but it also troubles the distinctions between the mundane and the eventful as climate catastrophe seeps into bodies and rhythms of life (Anderson, 2021; Murphy, 2017; Tavory & Wagner-Pacifici, 2022). This paper introduces the concept of smokeworlds as methodological sensitivity and theoretical orientation which attempts to follow smoke through its atmospheric ephemerality and the traces it leaves behind. Drawing on Armstrong’s (2008) ‘glassworlds’ and Coleman’s (2020) ‘glitterworlds’, I define smokeworlds as particular situations in which wildfire smoke becomes entangled within the enacting of particular realities and their imaginaries. Using Alberta, Canada, a region known for its fires and increasing smokiness, I will draw on publicly available texts, interviews, and autoethnographic dairies from two seasons of fieldwork to develop two entangled smokeworlds: the sensory infrastructure of the Alberta Air Health Quality Index and the phenomenological lifeworlds of Albertans. Each situation reveals a different array of practices through which wildfire smoke is sensed and made sense of. Through these practices, incommensurable ontologies come to exist within the messiness of everyday life. From these examples, I explore themes of materiality, sense-making, breath and embodiment, and ontological disorientation. This paper will aim to open up conversations on how to study and interpret the uncertainty of life in fleeting and uncertain atmospheres, as well as to explore how altered atmospheric milieus inspire certain imaginaries through which past, presents, and futures become (re)articulated.