This Handbook proposes an innovative and much-needed approach to the scholarship in humanities and social sciences that is entirely based on the phenomena of breath, breathing, and air. By offering an interdisciplinary perspective based in breathing, it develops new theories for a novel field of critical respiratory humanities and social sciences. The handbook also analyses the key consequences of such theories for philosophy and the related fields in humanities and social sciences (cross-cultural thinking, human geography, feminism and gender studies, cultural studies and anthropology, environmental and medical humanities). This radically new direction in interdisciplinary thinking is based on an innovative vision in which breathing is brought into the very center of our concern. This paradigm opens key new perspectives on the current crisis of intersubjective and community life, environmental and health crises, and closely related global social issues.

This Handbook appeals to students and researchers. It constitutes an attempt to address the hidden, yet fundamentally present dimension of breath and breathing in our bodily and affective lives, communities and environments and to revolutionize current discourses in the humanities and social sciences by addressing and thematizing many and varied conditions of breath in times and places where it is hard to breathe.

Lenart Škof is professor of philosophy and religious studies and Head of the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the Science and Research Centre (Koper, Slovenia). He is an author of several books, among them God in Post-Christianity: An Elemental Philosophical Theology (SUNY Press, 2024) and Antigone’s Sisters: On the Matrix of Love (SUNY Press, 2021). He authored and edited several works on the topic of respiratory thinking, air and breathing, among them Atmospheres of Breathing (ed. by L. Škof and P. Berndtson, SUNY Press, 2018), Ethik des Atems (Herder/Karl Alber, 2017), Breath of Proximity: Intersubjectivity, Ethics, and Peace (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), and Breathing with Luce Irigaray (ed. by L. Škof and E. Holmes, Bloomsbury, 2013). He is editor-in-chief of “Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing” series (with Magdalena Górska) and his main research interests are in respiratory philosophy, new elemental philosophy, and philosophical theology.

Magdalena Górska is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Gender Programme and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. She is the author of Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (2016), founder of the Breathing Matters Network, and co-editor (with Lenart Škof) of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing series. She is currently a principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded project RESPIRE: Planetary Breathing in Asphyxiating Times and has launched RESPIRATORIUM, a collaborative research hub for Critical Respiratory Studies developed as part of this project.