There’s Something in the Air

Abstract

This article engages with air from a posthuman performative perspective to prompt new thinking about postcolonial Hong Kong. Drawing from a small experiential study of Hong Kong air, this article shows how three becoming-with research practices; sensing air, tracing childhood memories, and cominglings were enacted to engage with data differently. Becoming-with Hong Kong air illuminates how new connections are made with data through inter- and intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and the material and discursive. This article argues that becoming-with practices are productive and necessary to rethink postcoloniality in Hong Kong.

Special issue: “Darkness matters”

“…Yet it is possible. Bidisha Banerjee and Mindy Blaise did it with considering air as an invisible nonhuman research participant (Banerjee & Blaise 2013). Nick Lee (2008) argued convincingly that a sleeping person can be an agentive research participant.…”

Taking Pause: The Role of Art and Literature in Reimagining Human-Nonhuman Relations and Transdisciplinary Collaboration

“…I could hear the trees: "Look beneath the undergrowth and smell, feel and see what you always knew was there…" (Dena Fam, 2021) Writers, artists and scholars have canvassed many ways of 'pausing' for thought or reflection: the pause produced by mindfulness and 'mindwandering' (Agnoli et al, 2018;Paul B. Paulus et al, 2021), by 'precognitive triggers' (Dewsbury, 2010a), including those generated by art (Thrift et al, 2010;Wood, 2016), in Saul Bellow's state of 'intransitive attention' induced by beautiful writing (2019 (1995), p. 180); by stepping away from 'the data' and immersing oneself in, and allowing one's perspective to be shifted by other thinkers (St. Pierre, 2019; by solitude and its capacity to stimulate imagination and creative thinking (Bowker et al, 2017;Knafo, 2012;Long & Averill, 2003;Paul B. Paulus et al, 2021); by postrepresentational and more-than-representational -sensory, affective, exploratory -3 connections with the world (Anderson & Harrison, 2010;Barad, 2012;Dewsbury, 2010aDewsbury, , 2010bLorimer, 2005) which include walking as enabling a particular kind of attention (B. Banerjee & Blaise, 2013;Instone, 2015;Kagan, 2019;Murray & Järviluoma, 2020;Palmer, 2014;Wylie, 2005); by an affective intensity that suspends our normal 'action-reaction circuits and linear temporality' (Massumi, 1995, p. 89). What is sought is a kind of thinking that is more 'responsible and responsive to the world's patternings and murmurings' (Barad, 2012, p. 207).…”