ABSTRACT
This chapter provides existing approaches to atmosphere in the social sciences and humanities, in order to establish how concepts of atmosphere have developed, how they have been mobilised in research theoretically and empirically, and political contexts in which we live. It discusses a processual concept of atmosphere as developed in human geography with the ethnographic-theoretical dialogues that are part of a design anthropological approach to uncertainty and emergence. Atmospheres are enduringly present, continually changing and inevitably part of the everyday and more extraordinary events, journeys and experiences of our lives. The atmospheres of events have long attracted the attention of researchers in human geography and anthropology. Gernot Bohme proposes that atmospheres have aesthetic qualities that 'unify a diversity of impressions in a single emotive state'. Every space, place and situation is tuned in a special way, and they project specific atmospheres.
