Grant: NWO PhD in the Humanities
Project name: Out of Breath: Towards a politics of breathability
Researcher: Sophie van Balen
Timeline: 2021-2025
Facing multifaceted and unequally distributed ecological crises requires that we turn our attention to the breathability of humans, nonhumans and environments. For by having imagined ourselves to be air- and breath-independent, we lost sight of the ecological and phenomenological structures and metabolisms in which we, as living beings among others, co-produce the climate(s) which we ourselves depend on for every breath. The question is: how can we better understand human and nonhuman existence as it takes place in – and is shaped by – less-than-breathable atmospheres? And can developing such understanding help in facing the ecological-political trouble of this century?
In this dissertation by Sophie van Balen, which received NWO-funding within their research program PhD in the Humanities, ways of living in and with un/breathable air are theorised and empirically explored to inform a future-oriented politics of breath. To that end, the project brings together contemporary climate philosophy with feminist and decolonial theory and politics. Following the tradition of empirical philosophy, philosophical ethnographic fieldwork is done to closely consider two actual and ongoing struggles: that of farmers, cows and surrounding nature in the Dutch nitrogen crisis; and that of bees, beekeepers, and flora in the biodiversity crisis.