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.

Magdalena Górska's research focuses on feminist politics of breathing and respiratory power relations. Her book Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability develops a feminist engagement with breath and breathing through a nonuniversalising and politicised understanding of embodiment where human bodies are conceptualised 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. 

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 Trakilović, Magdalena Górska is currently finalising an edited volume on Social and Political Suffocations on (Routledge 2026) 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 builds on the NOISE Summer School we organised in 2018. 

Together with Lenart Škof she is editing  Handbook of Critical Respiratory Studies: Breath and Air in Humanities and Social Sciences (Springer 2026). Based in an interdisciplinary approach to breathing, the handbook proposes respiratory concepts, theories, and methodologies for the fields of humanities and social sciences. 

Together with Lenart Škof, Magdalena Górska is editor 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. Books published within the series:

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.

Selected publications introducing Górska's critical, intersectional, feminist approach to breathing: