Current Anthropological Research: The Atmosphere as a Social Problem

This course examines the atmosphere not as a neutral or universal backdrop but as a historically produced and unevenly distributed social force. Drawing on anthropological theory and adjacent work in environmental humanities and science and technology studies, the course explores how air becomes an object of knowledge, governance, and contestation. We ask how atmospheres are constituted through colonial and industrial histories, and how they are differentially lived along lines of identity, class, health, and geography. Organized around key problems in contemporary anthropology, the course engages ethnographic and interdisciplinary scholarship that traces how air is made perceptible and actionable. Topics include toxic exposure and slow violence, the infrastructures of energy and urban life, and the epistemic practices through which atmospheres are measured, modeled, and regulated. We will attend to how scientific authority and regulatory regimes define thresholds of harm and responsibility, as well as to the ways communities contest these frameworks through alternative forms of knowledge and political action.

Particular emphasis is placed on the uneven distribution of habitable air. In what ways are some populations rendered more exposed, or made to be more vulnerable, or more expendable within atmospheric regimes? What forms of social life - both human and non-human - are organized and sustained through the management of air? The course also considers how embodied and affective dimensions of the everyday unfold with and through air, including respiration, sensory perception, spiritual practice, and environmental anxiety and attunement. 

A student who has completed the course should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence.

The student will be able to:

Knowledge

• provide an overview of the topic addressed in the course, with particular reference to its history and associated theoretical and methodological debates in social anthropology

Skills

• explain the current state-of-art of research in the field of study addressed in the course
• explain the various methodological and theoretical considerations that must be taken in order to further develop the field of study

General competence

• apply key concepts and perspectives from the course and its field of study independently, in the understanding and analysis of local and global processes
• apply an understanding of the correlation and difference between empirical data, theory and analysis in text production