Calls for Applications, Papers, and Submissions

Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality

July 8-11, 2025
University of Maryland, College Park,
ancestral lands of the Piscataway People

https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/

Call for Proposals

Reflecting on the use of tear gas and other chemical weapons during the 2016 Standing Rock protests, Paiute scholar Kristen Simmons notes that “[t]he conditions we breathe in are collective and unequally distributed. … The atmosphere is increasingly a sphere to be weaponized.” A few years later, this weaponization became clear as the unequally-experienced COVID-19 respiratory pandemic overlapped with protests over the chokehold murder of George Floyd at the hands of police—giving heartbreaking new relevance to the Black Lives Matter rallying cry, “I can’t breathe.” Meanwhile, deforestation and air pollution are again on the rise. The Amazon rainforest, for instance—dubbed the “lungs of the world” due to its ability to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen—has come under intensified threats. Wildfires stoked by climate change fill the air with toxic smoke. And new research finds that unhoused people are disproportionately exposed to air pollution. Breath and air, as has become palpably obvious, are phenomena necessary for life, yet often overlooked and not equally available to all. As historian Achille Mbembe states, what humanity currently faces is “a matter of no less than reconstructing a habitable earth to give all of us the breath of life.” 

Fittingly, in our fields of ecocriticism, ecomedia studies, and environmental humanities, we find a nascent wave of work attending to the idea that air/atmospheres are at once specific to our individual bodies, unequally experienced, and shared by all biotic life across time and space. This work contributes to an emerging “respiratory humanities” and “atmospheric humanities” —the latter of which, as the International Commission on Science and Literature and the International Commission on History of Meteorology recently declared in a joint call for papers, considers “the atmosphere’s agency as it becomes manifest as a medium, life-giver, carrier, nutrient source, threat and a concern in modern life, politics, and art.” Meanwhile, the prominent subfield of affect studies engages with more figurative conceptions of “atmosphere,” including mood and ambience. In sum, atmospheres become increasingly visible as sites of contestations and convergences where the intimacy of breath is bound up with wide-ranging environmental and cultural crises. 

Of course, atmospheric thinking has a very long history. The idea of "bad air" as a disease vector is an ancient one, and it persisted into the 19th century in the miasma theory of disease transmission. In the 1800s, polymath Charles Babbage wrote of the air as a “one vast library” that serves as a repository of human and more-than-human history. Scientists Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin recently concurred, suggesting with their “Orbis Hypothesis” that the European colonization of the Americas left an atmospheric trace. And since the late 1970s, the ozone layer and greenhouse gasses have been major topics of scientific as well as public concern.

We seek papers, creative works, and other forms of inquiry that engage with these concerns, broadly construed. Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

• “Settler atmospherics” (Simmons) and Indigenous activism 
• Climate and/as history; histories of weather 
• Sensing air pollution; citizen science around air pollution
• The emergence and role of the “respiratory humanities” or “atmospheric humanities” 
• Relationship of the above to the “blue humanities,” “green ecocriticism,” and/or “energy humanities”; waves of ecocriticism
• Aesthetics of visibility/invisibility and air 
• Representing air inequality in haptic, olfactory, or other non-visual media
• Unhoused populations and air inequality  
• Environmental racism and air inequality  
• Wildfires and smoke; prescribed burns and Indigenous fire knowledge as alternative technologies
• Respiratory pandemics and the media
• Rhetoric of anti-AAPI hate during COVID-19
• Masking and dis/ability rhetoric; long COVID and “crip time” (Alison Kafer)
• Air purification technology and the commodification of air (see Yangdon Li)
• “Atmospheric rivers,” flooding, and representation  
• Representations of atmospheric layers (troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere) 
• Air travel and alternatives 
• Space environmentalism: space debris, cosmic dust, extraterrestrial exploration
• Airwaves, radio waves, soundwaves—from podcasts to birdsong
• Affect studies and intangible/figurative atmospheres

We also welcome work that engages in other ways with the larger concerns outlined above—including climate change, environmental health and justice, settler colonialism—and/or with the vision and mission of ASLE, which seeks to inspire and promote intellectual work in the environmental humanities and arts. Our vision is an inclusive community whose members are committed to environmental research, education, literature, and art, as well as service, environmental justice, and ecological sustainability. See more here: https://www.asle.org/discover-asle/vision-history/.

Confirmed keynote speakers include: 

• Hsuan Hsu, author of The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts, and Air Conditioning
• Craig Santos Perez, winner of the 2023 National Book Award for poetry
• JT Roane, author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, and co-leader of the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers
• Kaia Sand, poet, activist, and Executive Director of Street Roots (Portland, OR)