Air care: an ‘aerography’ of breath, buildings and bugs in the cystic fibrosis clinic

TY - JOUR

T1 - Air care

T2 - an ‘aerography’ of breath, buildings and bugs in the cystic fibrosis clinic

AU - Brown, Nik

AU - Buse, Christina

AU - Lewis , Alan

AU - Martin, Daryl

AU - Nettleton, Sarah

N1 - © 2020 The Authors

PY - 2020/6/7

Y1 - 2020/6/7

N2 - With significant relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper contributes to emerging ‘aerographic’ research on the socio-materialities of air and breath, based on an in-depth empirical study of three hospital-based lung infection clinics treating people with cystic fibrosis. We begin by outlining the changing place of atmosphere in hospital design from the pre-antibiotic period and into the present. We then turn to the first of three aerographic themes where air becomes a matter of grasping and visualising otherwise invisible airborne infections. This includes imagining patients located within bodily spheres or ‘cloud bodies’, conceptually anchored in Irigaray’s thoughts on the ‘forgetting of the air’ and Sloterdijk’s immunitary ‘spherology’ of the body. Our second theme explores the material politics of air, air conditioning, window design, and the way competing ‘air regimes’ come into conflict with each other at the interface of buildings, bodies and the biotic. Our final theme attends to the ‘cost of air’, the aero-economic problem of atmospheric scarcity within modern high-rise, deep-density healthcare architectures.

AB - With significant relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper contributes to emerging ‘aerographic’ research on the socio-materialities of air and breath, based on an in-depth empirical study of three hospital-based lung infection clinics treating people with cystic fibrosis. We begin by outlining the changing place of atmosphere in hospital design from the pre-antibiotic period and into the present. We then turn to the first of three aerographic themes where air becomes a matter of grasping and visualising otherwise invisible airborne infections. This includes imagining patients located within bodily spheres or ‘cloud bodies’, conceptually anchored in Irigaray’s thoughts on the ‘forgetting of the air’ and Sloterdijk’s immunitary ‘spherology’ of the body. Our second theme explores the material politics of air, air conditioning, window design, and the way competing ‘air regimes’ come into conflict with each other at the interface of buildings, bodies and the biotic. Our final theme attends to the ‘cost of air’, the aero-economic problem of atmospheric scarcity within modern high-rise, deep-density healthcare architectures.

U2 - 10.1111/1467-9566.13104

DO - 10.1111/1467-9566.13104

M3 - Article

SN - 0141-9889

VL - 42

SP - 972

EP - 986

JO - Sociology of Health and Illness

JF - Sociology of Health and Illness

IS - 5

ER -