Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing

This book series focuses on a multidisciplinary range of perspectives on breath and breathing in a number of different philosophical, cultural, environmental and societal contexts. The series’ main objective is to bring together ideas and offer a strong collection of original work centred on breathful life-worlds and breathable futures as the basis for a respiratory paradigm shift in the humanities and social sciences.

Based on a careful process of identifying and a detailed analysing of central respiratory issues (ie. breath, breathing, climate, and atmosphere), the series addresses the unevenly shared and felt affects and effects of human and non-human relationships to the air and to the processes of breathing. The books will focus on breath, breathing, and air as a content, a vehicle and an atmospheric context for developing new theorizations of philosophical, ethical, cultural, social and environmental relations/ways of being-in-the-world. The interdisciplinary approach that combines perspectives of social sciences and humanities will address, for example, theologies, philosophies, geographies, medical perspectives, literary and political practices that are embodied in respiration. The books will address, but will not be limited to: phenomenological ontology of breathing, philosophical primacy of breathing, aerial poetics, police choke holds, police gassing; feminist, LGBTQ+ and intersectional politics; respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 and black lung disease; wildfires, dust storms and other forms of unequal exposure to air pollution; climate change; theological traditions and belief systems about breath; and also more artistic renditions and interpretations of aerial relationships. By analysing and conceptualising these issues, authors in the series will contribute to cultivating new ways to understand the respiratory world and strategies towards a more just social relations and economy of the breath.

Editors-in-Chief:

Lenart Škof, Science and Research Centre Koper

Magdalena Górska, University of Utrecht

John Durham Peters, Yale University

Marijn Nieuwenhuis, Durham University

Carla Tsampiras, University of Cape Town

Jerry Zee, Princeton University