Magdalena Gorská

Sociologist of Breathing and Air

Magdalena Górska is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies, and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the feminist politics of breathing and vulnerability, exploring how, despite the fact that we all breathe together, social and environmental inequalities mean that we do not breathe with equal ease.

Her book Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (2016) develops a feminist engagement with breathing and breathing through a non-universalising and politicised understanding of corporeality, in which human bodies are conceptualised as agents of intersectional politics. The book presents intersectional and anthroposocial, yet posthumanist, discussions of breathing and human materiality, focusing on bodily and affective practices of living as political matters.

She is the founder of the Breathing Matters Network and co-editor of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing series. She is co-editor (with Milica Trakilović) of Social and Political Suffocations (Routledge, forthcoming 2025) and editor-in-chief (with Lenart Škof) of Handbook of Critical Respiratory Studies: Breath and Air in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Springer, forthcoming 2025/26). She is currently working on her new project RESPIRE: Planetary Breathing in Asphyxiating Times (funded by the European Research Council).