Deadline: December 1, 2024
Contact: Jenna Gersie, University of Colorado Boulder
Email: jenna.gersie@colorado.edu

Breathing In/door Atmospheres: ASLE 2025 Panel

As made apparent by the rapid spread of COVID-19 in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces, indoor air quality is an issue of environmental health and justice. In 2020, the World Health Organization estimated that 3.2 million people die each year from household air pollution, largely due to illnesses caused or exacerbated by the use of indoor fires or inefficient stoves that burn kerosene, wood, dung, crop waste, or coal. Climate change can also make indoor air quality worse, as warmer outdoor air temperatures can increase the presence of allergens, which infiltrate indoors; more common and more severe wildfires also result in lower outdoor air quality, which makes its way inside. The average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors, and as with most environmental harms, those least responsible for the problem are the ones most impacted.

This panel will engage with indoor atmospheres as they are represented in literary texts. How are issues of indoor air quality depicted in domestic, industrial, or speculative environments? How do race, class, and gender influence the disparate ways that bodies are affected by indoor air? How is housing justice represented in literary texts? How does breath as an analytic reveal new ways of engaging with texts? In what ways do indoor spaces appear in environmental narratives, and how does the outdoor environment permeate those indoor spaces?

Please submit abstracts of 200-300 words on breath, multispecies breathing, environmental health and justice, housing justice as an environmental issue, and air quality in indoor spaces to Jenna Gersie (jenna.gersie@colorado.edu) by December 1, 2024.

Posted on October 3, 2024