Handbook of Critical Respiratory Studies: Breath and Air in Humanities and Social Sciences

This Handbook proposes an innovative and much-needed approach to the scholarship in humanities and social sciences that is entirely based on the phenomena of breath, breathing, and air. By offering an interdisciplinary perspective based in breathing, it develops new theories for a novel field of critical respiratory humanities and social sciences. The handbook also analyses the key consequences of such theories for philosophy and the related fields in humanities and social sciences (cross-cultural thinking, human geography, feminism and gender studies, cultural studies and anthropology, environmental and medical humanities). This radically new direction in interdisciplinary thinking is based on an innovative vision in which breathing is brought into the very center of our concern. This paradigm opens key new perspectives on the current crisis of intersubjective and community life, environmental and health crises, and closely related global social issues.

This Handbook appeals to students and researchers. It constitutes an attempt to address the hidden, yet fundamentally present dimension of breath and breathing in our bodily and affective lives, communities and environments and to revolutionize current discourses in the humanities and social sciences by addressing and thematizing many and varied conditions of breath in times and places where it is hard to breathe.