[PHILOS-L] University of Fort Hare Book Launch: Jamieson Webster - On Breathing: care in a time of catastrophe 24 March 2026
Christopher Allsobrook
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Title: On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe
DATE: 24 March 2026
TIME: 13:00 – 14:00 SAST
ONLINE: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/35224727048014?p=LetzYbT9Sr8UmK7Kji
Bio:
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis and has written for The Aesthete, Apology, Cabinet, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Playboy, The New York Times, and many psychoanalytic publications. She teaches at Eugene Lang College at the New School and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York.
Abstract:
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?
Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother.
The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of 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. Join us for this discussion of a narrative non-fiction about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an environmental catastrophe.
DATE: 24 March 2026
TIME: 13:00 – 14:00 SAST
ONLINE: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/35224727048014?p=LetzYbT9Sr8UmK7Kji
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