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Workshop "Atmospheric Violence"

Veranstaltungsdaten

About the workshop

Over the last decade, scholars in the social sciences and the humanities have drawn on the concept of 'atmosphere' to address the fundamental dimension of more-than-human coexistence. They have, for instance, focused on topics such as air and breath, thermal dynamics, olfactory regimes, and sonic vibrations, among others. The political dimension of atmospheres has become a central concern: Important contributions have elaborated how atmospheres constitute voluminous sites for political action, how they are turned into objects of governance, and how governmental technologies operate through atmospheric manipulations.

The workshop builds on this body of work, focusing in particular on the aspect of violence. Phenomena of violence are frequently mentioned in the current literature. They most explicitly appear in works that deal with the weaponization of atmospheres in chemical warfare and crowd policing, the latter epitomized in spraying of tear gas, the dispersion of ‘skunk water’ or the use of ‘sound cannons’. Moreover, increasingly, diagnostics of atmospheric violence extend to a wider range of phenomena such as the exposure to airborne pathogens, particle pollution in indoor and outdoor settings, and the harmful consequences of climate change. This recent awareness of what might be termed ‘elemental violence’ at a time of multiple atmospheric crises complements the established focus on how violence registers affectively, i.e. how it takes shape as embodied experience and imprints upon atmospheric memories. 

Nevertheless, there have been no concerted efforts to integrate these findings together and to specifically examine how violence is embodied within and exerted through atmospheres. The aims to address this gap. By discussing research on a diverse array of phenomena, we intend to explore violence as a dimension of atmospheres: How does violence manifest atmospherically? How must we rethink traditional concepts of (individual, structural, slow etc.) violence in the light of contemporary atmospheric upheaval? How must methodologies in the social sciences and the humanities adapt to be fully equipped for capturing the modalities of violence permeating the vital milieu of atmospheres?

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