Ronak K. Kapadia’s book project, “Inspiration: Scenes from the Respiratory Commons,” advances a transnational Asian Americanist account of the “respiratory commons,” treating breath as an aesthetic method and shared political resource amid racial capitalism, imperial war, ecological collapse, and pandemic governance. Centering queer and trans BIPOC artists across Asian and SWANA diasporas, it shows how speculative visual and installation practices diagnose suffocating regimes of policing, incarceration, and toxicity while building endurance, solidarity, and pleasure. Grounded in Asian American studies, queer and trans of color critique, and disability justice, the book proposes breath as a practice of resistance, care, and futurity, an embodied ethic for surviving together in constricted times.

Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator whose work links race, war, aesthetics, and empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century United States. He is associate professor and director of the Interdepartmental Graduate Concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago with affiliations in art history, global Asian studies, and museum and exhibition studies. Kapadia is the author of Insurgent Aesthetics (Duke Press, 2019), winner of the Surveillance Studies Network Best Book Prize, lead coeditor of Surviving the Long Wars (Bridge Books, 2024), and co-curator of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial & Summit in Chicago. He earned his PhD from the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis in 2012.