17/09/2026
In anticipation of the SAVA Team meeting with researchers at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) in Johannesburg on 6 October we are glad to share news of a new publication ‘Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres: Elemental Life and Environmental Crisis’, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr, to which Maja and Reuben Fowkes also contributed a chapter on ‘Breath from the Sky: Aerial Ecologies in the Anthropocene’. The book is published this week with UCL Press and is fully open access! Here: https://uclpress.co.uk/book/postcolonial-air-and-atmospheres
The volume re-opens and revitalises debates on the materialities of air and atmospheres, including practices of breathing, in a multitude of postcolonial and Southern hemispheric contexts. It probes the limits, and extends the narrow spatial purview, of much of the emerging scholarship, considering historical questions of air and enslavement alongside South Asian histories of air-conditioning and the drifting toxic atmospheres of water bodies in the African South.
Affective atmospheres born of dust, damp, wind and sound; unfree and impure airs shaped by histories of inequality; and modes and manners of breathing, whether asthmatically, interoceptively, laboriously or as a means of creating an artwork, all reinvigorate our understanding of aerial elemental media. Throughout, the book explores ways to recalibrate forms of air, atmospheres and breathing for a more productively entangled, relational, regenerative and just world.
The volume emerged from a collaboration between WISER at Wits University and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at University College London. It began as a co-hosted series called ‘Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres’, on the WISER platform.
