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This Handbook proposes an innovative and much-needed approach to the scholarship in humanities and social sciences that is entirely based on the phenomena of breath, breathing, and air. By offering an interdisciplinary perspective based in breathing, it develops new theories for a novel field of critical respiratory humanities and social sciences. The handbook also analyses the key consequences of such theories for philosophy and the related fields in humanities and social sciences (cross-cultural thinking, human geography, feminism and gender studies, cultural studies and anthropology, environmental and medical humanities). This radically new direction in interdisciplinary thinking is based on an innovative vision in which breathing is brought into the very center of our concern. This paradigm opens key new perspectives on the current crisis of intersubjective and community life, environmental and health crises, and closely related global social issues.
This Handbook appeals to students and researchers. It constitutes an attempt to address the hidden, yet fundamentally present dimension of breath and breathing in our bodily and affective lives, communities and environments and to revolutionize current discourses in the humanities and social sciences by addressing and thematizing many and varied conditions of breath in times and places where it is hard to breathe.
List of contents
Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Humanities.- Being of Breathing.- Sense of Breathing.- Voice of Breathing.- Cultivation of Breathing.- Humanity of Breathing.- Cosmos of Breathing.-Intersectional Feminist Approaches to Breath and Breathing.- Magdalena Górska and Matthew Houdek.- Breathing through Sex Panics.- That Transformative Dark Thing (essay reprint).- Our Breaths Will Shake the World.- Why Air is More Than a Metaphor for Freedom.- Respiratory Abolition: Toward Breathable Lives and Futures.- Medical Humanities and Disability Studies.- Breathing In Chronic Illness.- Anxious And Panicked Breathing.- Breath At the Limits of Life.- Stifled Breath in Housebound Experience.- Space And the Geography of Breath.- The Power of Co-Breathing.- Breathing Spaces / The Spatial Grammars of Breath.- Inside/Outside.- Verticals.- Volumes/ Enclosures.- Borders.- Particles.- Clouds.- Breath and more-than-human geography.- Animals.- Plants.- Bacteria.- Viruses.- Dust.- Radioactivity.- Ghosts.- Literature and Art.- Breath in and through Poetry.- Breath and Philology/Literary Studies.- Breath and Prose.- Breath, Sound and Music.- Breath and Movement/Performance.- Breath and Cinema.- Breathing with the Back, Dancing with the Breath.- Breath Pieces.- Ruah and pneuma in Judeo-Christianity.- Breath, Spirit, and Song in Christian Mysticism.- Prana in Indian Religions.- Prana and Mindfulness in Buddhism.- Qi in Chinese culture and religion.- The Crucial Role of Breath in East Asian Methods of Self-Cultivation.- Achieving Personhood through Vital Refinement in Ancient Daoism.
About the author
Lenart Škof is among the leading international scholars in the field of respiratory thinking. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and Max Weber Institute for Advanced Social Sciences (Erfurt) and guest lecturer at various departments (Australia, India, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Poland). He authored several works on the topic of respiratory thinking, air and breathing, among them Atmospheres of Breathing, ed. by L. Škof and P. Berndtson (SUNY Press, 2018), Ethik des Atems (Herder/Karl Alber, 2017), Breath of Proximity: Intersubjectivity, Ethics, and Peace (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), and Breathing with Luce Irigaray, ed. by L. Škof and E. Holmes (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Magdalena Górska is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies and a research affiliate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. She was a visiting scholar at the Feminist Studies Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a leading scholar of respiratory studies, focusing on analyzing breathing with regard to social power relations. Her respiratory publications include Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (Linköping University Press, 2016), and articles and book chapters such as “Why is Breathing Political” (Lambda Nordica, 2021), “Corpo-Affective Politics of Anxious Breathing: On the Agential Force of Bodies and Affects in Vulnerable Protest” (Routledge, 2020), “Feminist Politics of Breathing” (SUNY Press, 2018). She is a founder of the Breathing Matters Network.
Summary
This Handbook proposes an innovative and much-needed approach to the scholarship in humanities and social sciences that is entirely based on the phenomena of breath, breathing, and air. By offering an interdisciplinary perspective based in breathing, it develops new theories for a novel field of critical respiratory humanities and social sciences. The handbook also analyses the key consequences of such theories for philosophy and the related fields in humanities and social sciences (cross-cultural thinking, human geography, feminism and gender studies, cultural studies and anthropology, environmental and medical humanities). This radically new direction in interdisciplinary thinking is based on an innovative vision in which breathing is brought into the very center of our concern. This paradigm opens key new perspectives on the current crisis of intersubjective and community life, environmental and health crises, and closely related global social issues.
This Handbook appeals to students and researchers. It constitutes an attempt to address the hidden, yet fundamentally present dimension of breath and breathing in our bodily and affective lives, communities and environments and to revolutionize current discourses in the humanities and social sciences by addressing and thematizing many and varied conditions of breath in times and places where it is hard to breathe.
