Magdalena Górska 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 Górska's research focuses on feminist politics of breathing and vulnerability. Her book Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability 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 Breathing Matters Network.
Magdalena Górska’s work shows how we are all co-respirators while we do not breathe on equal terms due to social and environmental inequalities. Those inequalities – such as colonialism, processes of racialization, migration, classism, and geopolitical power relations – 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 – funded by the European Research Council through the Starting Grant award (the project begins in January 2025) – Górska 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, Górska is going to establish RESPIRATORIUM, a research hub focusing on critical, intersectionally feminist analysis of respiration and asphyxiation.
Interview introducing Magdalena Górska's work on feminist politics of breathing:
The interview was conducted by Sophie Fransman for MCW YouTube channel.
Together with Milica Trakilovic, Magdalena Górska 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 NOISE Summer School we organized in 2018. Together with Lenart Škof she is editor of the first comprehensive handbook of critical respiratory studies that will be published by Springer.
Magdalena Górska is editor-in-chief (with Lenart Škof) of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing 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 series’ 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 Górska started Breathable Futures Today 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 Portal”, 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 project's website and more varied information related to the topic is shared on the project's Facebook page.
Selection of publications introducing Górska's critical, intersectional, feminist approach to breathing: