(71g) “I Can’t Breathe:” the Invisible Slow Violence of Breathing Politics in Minneapolis
AIChE Annual Meeting
2023
2023 AIChE Annual Meeting
Environmental Division
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: Laboratory, Modeling, and Field Studies
Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - 10:00am to 10:20am
Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, his utterance, âI canât breathe,â reverberated internationally as the world population grappled with the twin specters of life-threatening COVID-19 respiratory morbidities and mounting years under increasingly polarized racist regimes. Despite crisis fatigue, national and international outpourings of solidarity trended on social and mainstream media. However, in this moment, the legacy of structural and slow violences against the living, breathing MinneapolisâSt. Paul communities of color were obscured. This study addresses transdisciplinary breathing politics in this mid-sized American city to integrate atmospheric indicators (concentrations of criteria pollutants including particulate matter and gaseous pollutants), traffic indicators (Minnesota Department of Transportation permanent traffic monitoring station data), and social indicators (community responses in newspaper and Twitter archives), ultimately making visible how Floydâs utterance reflects much deeper patterns of stratified urban public health risks and socio-environmental airscape politics.
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![](https://www.aiche.org/sites/default/files/aiche-proceedings/3382596/papers/672686/Paper_672686_abstract_203753_0.png)