Con-Spiration: The Joyous Imperative of Community Action ASLE, 2025
July 8
ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference
Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality
July 8-11, 2025
University of Maryland, College Park,
ancestral lands of the Piscataway People
2025 is the time to reclaim our civil rights to the collective act of breathing uncontaminated air. Playing with collective-creative risk taking, my pedagogical-personal presentation explores our epigenetic potential to conspire counternormativity. Conspire means to breathe together. We seek the possibility of breathing together as a form of conviviality/ Convivencia (referring to the Golden Age in Spain during which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities symbiotically thrived). Adrienne Rich reminds us: “The breath is…Ruach, the spirit, the human connection to the universe.” What happens when socialized norms are so deeply ingrained in us that our imaginations contort perceptions of “reality;” when our imaginations become more threatening than “reality”—eradicating the potential of the impossible? I investigate how, through the manufactured construction of desire, our imaginations are rendered impotent, our capacity to breathe, dream, and think is so profoundly distorted by normative hierarchies in which we are complicit; and, how to theoretically and practically engage passion politics as a strategy to conspire our collective emancipation. How can we conspire the in-between—the mutable space between “reality”/ the supposed inevitability of modernity (industrial-waste, convenience culture) and our moral imagination. Exploring infrastructures of etheric (the nothing that connects everything) storytelling, electro-magnetic narratives as webs of local-global, personal-political sense-making, my interdisciplinary invitation will ignite a “practical” sensorial relationality in the face of “common-sense,” status-quo normalcy. Breath dematerializes this status quo. Breath makes manifest the “human relation” (Irigaray 2008:98). “The West is stifled by its inability to breathe” (2002:6). Breath offers pause, inviting us to reconsider what we think we know; it challenges the relentless pace of Progress; it transforms culturally idolized mind-body dichotomies. Breath joins the individual with the social/the private with the public/the personal with the political. Through individual breath as collective air, the both/and supersedes hierarchical erasure of difference.