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E-book Imagining Air : Cultural Axiology and the Politics of Invisibility
A poorly designed bottle sits atop a mantelpiece, contents slowly leaking into the surrounding environment. Not toxic, but affective, this bottle contains air collected from the Irish countryside—captured, commodified, and trans-ported across the globe to lonely “expats” separated from families amid the shuttering of global borders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.2 This bottled air, while a novelty, was purchased in service of a very specific purpose, that being connectivity and a brief moment of immersion. Air is a consistent biological necessity, indispensable to human and more-than-human beings, to life and survival. However, air is materially and ideologically complex; at once an environmental and scientific concern amid contemporary climate devastation, central medium for understandings of the world, and register of entanglement, relation, and well-being. The novelty air, selling out during an unfolding global pandemic, is a register of air’s complexity, at once local and global, present and absent, affective and material. Attention to air across contemporary scholarship reveals that air not only carries us through space and time, but is also fundamental to being and living.
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