ISRF Early Career Fellow 2022-23
ISRF Early Career Fellow 2022-23
Gavin Weedon joined Nottingham Trent University as Senior Lecturer in 2016, having completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia and MSc at Loughborough University. His research explores the social and ecological dimensions of embodied practices and is presently focused on two main projects. The first (with Samantha King, Queen’s University) charts the cultural ascendance of protein as the über nutrient of our times through a blend of cultural studies, political ecology, and critical theories of the body. The second, supported by the ISRF, posits breath and breathing as central to global social and environmental crises and as the corporeal basis for a politics of shared vulnerability.
Respiratory Justice offers a novel conceptualisation of breath and breathing as connecting key twenty-first century crises of climate, health, and racial injustice. By tracing breath’s rhythms and recurrences across an array of places, organisms, policies, and social movements, the project charts new connections in social and political theory through the corporeal experience of everyday life. This project moves beyond ideas of bodily sovereignty and legal autonomy (e.g. the human right to breathe) towards a novel conceptualisation of shared vulnerability, at once social, planetary and corporeal. By bringing together original historical material, scientific expertise, policy documents, and public discourse on breath and air, and through a blend of historical and contemporary cases, the project develops an embodied conceptualisation of pressing global social and environmental crises.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].