Volumetric citizenship

Abstract

In Thailand, the volatile period from 2019 to 2023 was marked by changing material and political atmospheres. Air pollution, the COVID-19 pandemic, and government restrictions on speech transformed how Thai citizens breathed and how they related to the monarchy. Understanding this period as a history of breath reconceptualizes the citizen-body as volumetric, recasting politics as an intermaterial practice. Breath, its vibrations, and its constraints, as it moves across the topologies of the respiratory system, generate densely material, richly symbolic political relations that bind citizens to one another, to the polity, and to the world. Small particles, dust, viruses, speech restrictions, and tear gas constrained the breath of Thai citizens while shaping the conditions in which dissenting vibrations could shake the country's cosmologies. Attention to the citizen-body as volumetric thus recasts the lungs as relational chambers of political capacity, resituating political analysis within the material world and suggesting that all politics are, in some sense, environmental.