Air Matters

This course focuses on conceptualizing air across cultures, time and space. If western episteme has long relied on earthbound vocabularies in order to edify its modernizing project, what happens when we set to rethink its basic premises through aerial logics? Can we even suggest adopting an air perspective or point of view without falling back into those very earthbound terms on which knowledge has long been made to be grounded? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this course proposes to analyze plural histories of the air that have not been sufficiently acknowledged. Drawing on a variety of cultural and historical examples, each week will entail ungrounding air through a particular subject-matter: medical, legal, war, race, gender, religion, media and technology, pollution and climate change, design, art and architecture, cities and countryside, the future of masks, or exoplanet atmospheres.