‘Action, Climate, Crisis: Anthropological tales in times of climate change’

Cristobal Bonelli and Branwyn Poleykett organized the second session of the series of seminars ‘Action, Climate, Crisis: Anthropological tales in times of climate change’, which brings scholars working on climate and environmental crisis to Amsterdam to engage with UvA anthropologists.

The second seminar of the series was in charged by Professor Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and had Tina Harris and Martha Dietrich as discussants.

Gabrys’ talk entitled Atmospheric Citizens: How to Make Breathable Worlds built upon material from the book ‘Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle’, and discussed how atmospheric citizens are constituted through practices of sensing environments and working to build more breathable worlds. It described collaborations to monitor air pollution from fracking infrastructure, to document emissions in urban environments, and to create air-quality gardens. Professor Gabrys showed how people respond to, care for, and struggle to transform environmental conditions informs the political subjects and collectives they become as they strive for more breathable worlds.