A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.” Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? In this event, Jamieson Webster will draw on psychoanalytic theory and reflect on her own experiences to explore air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.

Jamieson Webster is a clinical psychoanalyst, professor, and New York Review of Books contributor. Her last book, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, is to be published by Catapult in 2026.

Nica Siegel is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. She is the author of the forthcoming manuscript Politics and Exhaustion: The Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique.