Matthew Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. Recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts. At the center of much of this has been questions about the promise of filter technologies as environmental and emotional remedy. Much of his writing during 2022–2023 at the Humanities Center will be about filters.
SHC Project
Filtered Life: Gendered Dwelling Amidst Environmental Distress
Around the world, fraught feelings about filters are on the rise, as people are enticed to sort the unwanted from the desired. Teleologies of purity are longstanding, but how people are being urged to use filters to cleanse their immediate environments has been intensifying in many locales. For instance, in China, apparitions like “airpocolypse” (kongqimori) and “novel coronavirus” (xinguanbingdu) have been triggering cascading cycles of affect and action regarding what one breaths. Urgencies and practices have been converging and multiplying in the PRC regarding how to filter out aerosolized contaminants. In response, many an expert, governmental representative, and entrepreneur now encourage people there and elsewhere to introduce air purification technologies into the intimate and highly gender-modulated spaces of the home. What forms of authority, including gender, are turned on and off with the uses of these technologies in residential settings? How are denizens reaching for visual media, including forms hosted by highly filtered internet platforms, to represent their experiences dwelling amidst filtration, and thereby positing new politics of ecological ruin?