Coloniality and Communications: What is Air as Colonial Media? (Episode 4)

This episode features Burçe Çelik reflecting on air as a form of colonial media. Air is fundamental to communication and well-being: it carries sound when we speak or sing, enables oral exchange, and often mediates emotion and perception as people look to the sky for breath, relief, and a sense of connection between inside and outside. This episode explores how these communicative capacities of air were transformed under colonial conditions. When air became instrumentalised through technologies of surveillance, transmission, and spectacle, it also became a medium through which power was exercised and populations were subjected, revealing air’s central role in colonial communications.© the creators