RESPIRE: Planetary Breathing in Asphyxiating Times

We live in a time of multispecies suffocation. This is not a metaphor but a material process of contemporary multispecies living and dying on this planet.

RESPIRE will address the fact that we do not know what this planetary multispecies suffocation consists of and will investigate how we can comprehend and transform it.

It will do so through extensive fieldwork that includes collaboration with natural scientists, organisations, artists, and stakeholders.

This approach is needed because the natural sciences study environmental problems but address them separately from social issues and do not offer an overall understanding of multispecies suffocation.

The humanities offer important analyses of the effects of environmental and social degradation but no perspective for analysing planetary multispecies suffocation.RESPIREs hypothesis is that to describe and understand multispecies suffocation, we need approaches that address social and environmental issues as interrelated, and need to strengthen the scientific role of the humanities and arts, which specialise in challenging established norms and beliefs.

We will analyse multispecies suffocation through the planetary lungs and their related problems: forests (deforestation), ocean (dead-zones low oxygen areas), and soil (peatlands).

Our inductive inquiry from humanities and art-based research perspectives will deliver fundamental research that will contribute to future research on social and climate change-related issues by producing a socio-environmental interdisciplinary approach and revealing the respiratory and multispecies dimensions of current challenges.

RESPIRE will also develop new respiration-focused methodologies, concepts, and innovative pathways for a more breathable future.

The project will further develop the emerging field of Critical Respiratory Studies, in which the PI is one of the leading scholars, and bring a humanities and arts perspective to the natural sciences.