Jessica Emily Barnes

JESSICA BARNES, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Porous City: An Ethnography of Air Pollution in London.” Air pollution impedes breath and shortens lives. In cases where it is not manifest as visible smog, however, poor air quality is often not a matter of widespread concern. This project examines the racialized and class-inflected ways in which urban air pollution shapes daily life. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in London, the project explores three domains — the home, street, and city. It looks, first, at how residents of a West London neighborhood evaluate and influence indoor air quality through their practices of window opening, cooking, and incense burning, and at the stress and labor of inhabiting moldy homes. Second, it examines how London residents navigate traffic-filled streets, their decisions mediated by contrasting perceptions of safety and danger. Third, it considers how invisible pollutants across the city are rendered visible through monitoring and color-coded representations, and how national and international dynamics shape the daily experience of air pollution in London. With its multi-scaled design and spanning of indoor and outdoor domains, this ethnography offers novel insights into the nexus of people, air, and pollutants, and the systemic inequalities that influence how these things come together.