Magdalena GĂłrska is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University. Together with Dr. Jamila Mascat she is also a co-coordinator of MA Gender Studies Programme.
Magdalena GĂłrska's research focuses on feminist politics of breathing and vulnerability. Her book develops a feminist engagement with breath and breathing through a nonuniversalizing and politicized understanding of embodiment where human bodies are conceptualized as agential actors of intersectional politics. Her work offers intersectional and anthropo-situated while posthumanist discussions of breath, human material agency and focuses on the quotidian bodily and affective practices of living as political matters. She is the founder of the .
Magdalena GĂłrskaâs work shows how we are all co-respirators while we do not breathe on equal terms due to social and environmental inequalities. Those inequalities â such as colonialism, processes of racialization, migration, classism, and geopolitical power relations â shape local and global politics and ways of living that make some lives more un/breathable than others. In her new project RESPIRE: Planetary Breathing in Asphyxiating Times â funded by the European Research Council through the Starting Grant award (the project begins in January 2025) â GĂłrska and the RESPIRE team will explore how these inequalities and environmental destruction are entangled in the way the planet Earth breathes. The project is intrinsically interdisciplinary and will involve collaboration with natural scientists, artists, and NGOs. As part of the project, GĂłrska is going to establish RESPIRATORIUM, a research hub focusing on critical, intersectionally feminist analysis of respiration and asphyxiation.
Interview introducing Magdalena GĂłrska's work on feminist politics of breathing:
The interview was conducted by Sophie Fransman for MCW YouTube channel.
Together with Milica Trakilovic, Magdalena GĂłrska is currently preparing an edited volume on Social and Political Suffocations that turns attention to how intersectional dynamics of social and environmental power relations operate in constituting whose lives and what forms of living are currently un/breathable. The volume builts on the we organized in 2018. Together with Lenart Ć kof she is editor of the first comprehensive handbook of critical respiratory studies that will be published by Springer.
Together with , Magdalena GĂłrska is editor-in-chief of the book series. It is a project entirely dedicated to the topics and phenomena of breath, breathing, air, and atmosphere. Starting from 2022, we will be publishing monographs, edited books and short creative works. The seriesâ main objective is to bring together ideas and offer a strong collection of original work centered on air and breath, breathfull and/or breathless life-worlds and breathable futures as the basis for a respiratory intervention in the humanities and social sciences.
As a reflection on current times, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic Magdalena GĂłrska started project - a small series of interviews on what kinds of different, counter-hegemonic futures could the corona pandemic lead to. Inspired by Arundhati Roy's "The Pandemic is a Portalâ, this mini project asked - from critical feminist, queer, anti-racist, and anti-ableist perspectives - what kind of portal(s) we were at that moment and what the 'next' world could be? The interviews are available on the and more varied information related to the topic is shared on the project's .
Selection of publications introducing GĂłrska's critical, intersectional, feminist approach to breathing:
Breathing Matters introduces critical feminist intersectional approach to breathing, emphasizing its importance in both quotidian and structural politics. The book shows how breath, breathing, and suffocation are fundamentally shaped through social inequalities that saturate our atmospheres. It argues that breathing is a bodily, affective, and political process that is common, differential, and transformative. The commonality of breathing highlights how breath is shared by all breathing beings and across this planet, i.e. how âwe are all in this togetherâ. The differential character of breathing underlines how we do not all breathe on equal terms, i.e. âhow we are all in this together, but not in the same waysâ. The differential character of breathing articulates how unequal power relations materialize bodily and affectively making some lives more un/breathable than others. The transformative character of breathing rests in its material-semiotic, corpo-affective capacity to transform unbreathable states and bring a potentiality for change. Breathing Matters is grounded in agential realist (Barad) and feminist posthumanist conceptual frameworks and develops an approach to breathing that is anthropo-situated and anti-anthropocentric.
The article in Lambda Nordica explores why and how breathing is a political issue. It highlights the bio- and necropolitical aspects of breathing and suffocation, arguing that the ability or inability to breatheâand to live a breathable lifeâis influenced not only by environmental toxicity like air pollution but also by social toxicity like social inequality and conceptualizations of âwho counts as humanâ or whose life is deemed as disposable.
In the context of current environmental and social crises, it is necessary to analyse social and environmental exploitation not only together but, more importantly, as mutually constitutive. The chapter "With a Flip of a Light Switch: A Socio-Environmental Understanding of Intersectional Power Relations" argues that intersectionality should be central to how we understand power dynamics shaping socio-environmental challenges and inequalities. Drawing on agential realism, the chapter introduces a posthumanist perspective on intersectionality that builds on foundational works by critical race theorist and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw, social theorist Patricia Hill Collins, and the Combahee River Collective. The proposed approach seeks to facilitate an analytics for understanding both human and more-than-human impacts of current socio-environmental emergencies.
The book chapter Corpo-Affective Politics of Anxious Breathing discusses how politics take place not only in government policies or organized protests but also in everyday practices. It focuses on the concept of âcorpo-affectivity,â introduced in Breathing Matters, and examines how breathing embodies and expresses politics through the body and affect. This chapter is part of Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, a volume edited by Basia Sliwinska, which examines how contemporary art addresses politics through embodiment.
This dialogue with Malou Juelskjær, Helle Plauborg, and Stine Adrin explores the onto-epistemological and methodological aspects of working with breathing from Karen Barad's agential realist perspective. It emphasizes Górskaâs focus on connecting Baradâs concept of intra-activity with the idea of difference, or 'differentiality,' which highlights the importance of thinking difference as a process rather than essence. The concept of 'matter-work,' developed in Breathing Matters, is discussed to better understand how bodies, in an intra-active and differential way, metabolize our natural-cultural world and how this process is political. The chapter is part of Dialogues on Agential Realism: Engaging in Worldings through Research Practice, a volume edited by Juelskjær, Plauborg, and Adrin, which explores various forms of agential realism-inspired research.
This German translation by Natalie Lettenewitsch and Linda Waack consists of abridged excerpts from Breathing Matters and focuses on understanding breathing as both a common and differential process. The chapter is part of Ein- und Ausströmungen: Zur Medialität der Atmung, a volume edited by Lettenewitsch and Waack, which explores breath and breathing from a media and cultural perspective.
The book chapter Feminist Politics of Breathing summarizes the key ideas from Breathing Matters, explaining why breathing is both a feminist and political issue. It shows how examining breathing through the lens of power relations helps us understand how social power dynamics are embodied in daily life. This chapter is part of Atmospheres of Breathing, a volume edited by Lenart Ć kof and Petri Berndtson, which introduces the study of breath and breathing from a humanities perspective.
The book chapter âFeministyczna polityka oddychaniaâ is a Polish translation by Olga Cielemecka of the chapter with the same name simulateously published in English in the Atmospheres of Breathing volume. The book Feministyczne Nowe Materialismy, edited by Olga Cielemecka and Monika Rogowska-Stangret, offers a comprehensive exploration of the diverse work within the feminist new materialist theoretical frameworks.