“Objects, processes, or events that in some ways disclose, generate, or intensify the condition of being enveloped by the elemental force of atmospheres,” Derek McCormack (2018) proposes, are “atmospheric things.” The balloon, for instance, might be construed as a device that not only explicates but also draws force from its immersion in air. We invite papers that contend with aerotechnologies, understood as infrastructures, devices, knowledge systems, and particles that make air as much a technological fact as it is a natural one. What does it mean to study air as elemental technology? How is air — as an element — constitutive, pervasive, and facilitative of emergent kinds of social experiences and relations? How are wind (Howe 2019, Boyer 2019), climate engineering (Furuhata 2019), teargas (Nieuwenhuis 2016), industrial gases (Banken and Stokes 2015), terrariums (Darby 2007), breathing (Braun 2014; Mbembe 2020), as well as other airy matters technologically mediated, rendered, and configured? How does air come to be known or contested through processes of racial, (settler) colonial, and capitalist formations (Flikke 2018, Simmons 2017)? If techne denotes the practices of making, we propose that aerotechnologies relate and relay connections between people, non-human actors, epochs, and places, evoking the conference theme that asks what are good (airy) relations? In addition to treating air as technological, we are also interested in papers that explore air as an elemental medium that link different scales of political and social action (Peters 2015, Horn 2018, Choy 2011), especially from perspectives tethered in the global South.
