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This article urges a consideration of the atmospheric afterlives of fossil-fueled imperialism as not just accumulated gases and particles but also durable spatial dispositions governing how atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined. Focusing on the contemporary air pollution crisis in India, it analyzes how governmental responses to death-dealing airs today draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats, partaking in a climate of enclosure. Using archival, legal, and media sources, it excavates the imperial traces of three atmos-spheres, or spaces within which air is imagined, contained, or governed. The first is the Indian lung, an object of exoticized medical interest since the late nineteenth century. Tracing the reemergence of racialized claims of "deficient" Indian lung capacity, the article shows how a colonial epistemology of tropical otherness produces a strategic imperceptibility of today's pollution-induced illness. The second is the colonial hill station, where colonial theories of medical topography shape present-day discourses of "lung-cleansing" hill vacations, casting atmospheric vulnerability as a natural condition of the tropical plains—the only solution to which is escape. The third is the privatized air offered through air pollution masks and purifiers, which draw from colonial practices of architecture and dress premised on a presumption that "the outside" is a zone of inherent biophysical risk. These three atmospheres together confirm that until the climate of enclosure is challenged, investments in sequestration will supersede structural efforts to produce air otherwise. The article also urges consideration of non-European atmospheres to understand how normative racial categories are reinforced through models of atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article connects growing interest in affective atmospheres in human geography with critical geographies of diplomacy. Diplomats inhabit, discuss, and operate in and through atmospheres. Specifically, and uniquely, this article explores atmospheric manipulation by them and its connection to geopolitical claim making. In this way, it adds to the work in human geography on atmospheres by revealing its politics; that is, how atmospheres through spatiotemporal and relational processes are manipulated to do the work of geopolitics. Importantly, it also exposes how atmospheres are not incidental, accidental, or unimportant to geographies of diplomacy. Manifestly, atmospheres are political and have consequences. This article is grounded empirically in accounts of atmosphere in the United Nations Security Council by its high-level current diplomatic members. The focus is on the intensity of their "lived" experience and their registering and appraisal of the emerging, transitioning, and transformative atmospheres in the Council. Crucially, their accounts link the complexities of atmospheric perturbations, diplomatic "moments," and subjectivity with manipulation. Collectively, they expose the cognitively penetrable although differentially affected nature of atmospheric manipulation and how the staging of an atmosphere is taken up and reworked by diplomatic bodies. The specific context for the study of atmospheric manipulation is a Council meeting on the worsening political and humanitarian crisis in Syria and the formulation of a military response by three of its permanent members (the United States, France, and the United Kingdom) in April 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artículo explora los encuentros elementales y las geografías imaginativas del imperio para desarrollar un nuevo medio de involucrarse con las geografías históricas del futuro. Recientemente, los futuros se han convertido en tópico importante de la indagación histórica y cultural, y los geógrafos históricos tienen un papel importante que jugar para entender el lugar del futuro en el pasado, y para interrogar el papel de los futuros propuestos en configurar la acción en los presentes históricos. Con base en literatura de estudios de ciencia y tecnología, se desarrolla un marco para enfrentar las geografías materiales e imaginativas que coalescen alrededor de las prácticas de la imaginación, la expectativa y la predicción. Este marco se usa luego para reconstruir los esfuerzos por desarrollar el viaje en dirigibles en el Imperio Británico en los años 1920s y 1930s. En un momento de ansiedad imperial, se tuvo la esperanza de que los dirigibles pudieran mantener la unidad imperial transportando cuerpos, capital y capacidad militar entre sus puntos más apartados. No obstante, las proyecciones confiadas de la colonización del espacio aéreo global fueron afectadas por los encuentros materiales con un entorno atmosférico vibrante y a menudo impredecible. El artículo busca estimular el trabajo renovado sobre las geografías históricas del futuro, contribuyendo además a los debates sobre las geografías culturales y políticas de la atmósfera, y la construcción de conocimiento atmosférico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us reimagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect on some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]