How might living atmospherically shape relations to climate and environment?
Shared by KIM ATKINSON
“We live in atmospheres, we talk about them and we move through them. Yet atmospheres are impossible to capture, elusive to define and continually beyond our grasp as they ongoingly transform”
Sumartojo & Pink, 2019
How might living atmospherically shape relations to climate and environment? This question is sparked by Sumartojo and Pink’s (2019) book, Atmospheres and the experiential world: Theory and methods. It is a question that I am thinking with and in relation to urban childhood environments. I am wondering how to make connections across local and global environments/atmospheres. How to make such a horizontal move? Fostering horizontal relationships is one of radical reorientation and/or perception to lived relations that are ‘more-than-human’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014). The above question also pertains to affection and care with and in atmospheres. How to, for example, care for the ‘soil’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015) that sustains and thus co-constitutes atmospheres? How to foster ‘relationships of sustenance’ (TallBear, 2015) that Indigenous peoples have always known and do so well? If atmospheres cannot be captured, how might the child engage in space-time-place compositions that make past, present, and future atmospheres relevant, tangible, and worth urgent concern?
References
Manning, E. & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2015). Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care. Social Studies of Science, 1-26.
Sumartojo, S. & Pink, S. (2019). Atmospheres and the experiential world: Theory and methods. New York, NY: Routledge.
TallBear, K. (2015). Theorizing queer inhumanisms: An Indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human. CLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2-3), 230-235.