Categories
Conference Opportunities

Launching the Atmospheric Humanities

Online Conference, 3-5 August 2021

The Launching the Atmospheric Humanities conference, originally scheduled to take place in July 2020 in Hermoupolis, Greece took place online from 3-5 August 2021.

For a full programme, which includes individual abstracts please scroll down.

For more information about this conference, please contact Dr Vladimir Jankovic (Vladimir.Jankovic@ manchester.ac.uk).

The Atmospheric Humanities is a fast-emerging field of scholarship seeking to understand socio-cultural dimensions of atmospheric experience, knowledge and practice. Examining atmospheric agency in its historical and contemporary manifestations, atmospheric humanities explore the atmosphere as a site of diverse cultural appropriations of air’s modalities and their reproduction in practices of aerial and climatological citizenship. This foundational workshop aims to initiate and foster discussions on how atmospheric themes, memes, and objects emerge, spread and travel across artistic and academic communities. We especially welcome contributions from scholars whose work spans disciplines, including, but not limited to, literary and media studies, history of science, environmental history, aesthetics, visual arts, architecture, phenomenology, and social sciences.

Key themes:

  • The changing representation(s) of the atmosphere in art and popular media, both contemporary and historical.
  • Interfaces and interactions between scientific understanding(s) of the atmosphere and other ways of knowing or experiencing the atmosphere (e.g. political, indigenous, religious, philosophical, aesthetic).
  • Explorations of space and scale in relation to human understanding of the atmosphere and related concepts such as weather and climate.
  • The material culture of the atmosphere, including technologies used to measure, assess, represent and manipulate the atmosphere.