The felt, shared quality of a situation—the diffuse, more-than-individual “weather” of a scene—that emerges from entanglements of bodies, things, spaces, signs, technologies, discourse, and materials. It gives a scene its tone and orients how action, attention, and meaning unfold, shaping what becomes thinkable, sayable, and doable.
Atmosphere names the collectively sensed tone of a situation—its charge, moods, and textures—not as private feelings but as relational fields that take shape through arrangements of space, objects, bodies, media, and power. In affect theory, atmospheres are often described as “ambient” or “in the air”: they are tangible yet hard to pin down, enveloping participants and “tuning” attention, inclination, and action. Following Massumi, atmospheres are intensities that surround and move through bodies before they settle into named emotions; following Ahmed, they are patterned through histories of contact, norms, and institutional arrangements that make some bodies feel at home and others out of place. New materialist work (e.g., Bennett) highlights how nonhuman forces, such as lighting, architecture, ventilation, furniture, interfaces, cables, co-compose these tonalities; posthumanist approaches (e.g., Haraway, Barad) underscore how apparatuses and discourses intra-act to enact particular atmospheric possibilities and exclusions. In this sense, atmosphere is not a backdrop but an active participant in worlding: it conditions attention, frames judgment, invites or inhibits speech, and inflects perception and memory.
For postqualitative, new materialist, and posthumanist praxis, atmosphere offers a way to perceive how matter and meaning co-constitute the lived sense of a classroom, lab, or platform. Reading atmospherically means attuning to how policies, prompts, model interfaces, error messages, screen glow, room acoustics, and institutional narratives condense into a felt surround. It also means noticing how agential cuts, in the form of rules, settings, placement of devices, or chosen exemplars, thicken some moods (anticipation, suspicion, curiosity) while thinning others. Atmosphere, then, is a concept for registering how the more-than-human pedagogy is already leaning toward certain futures, or how the air “wants” things.
Atmosphere aligns with postqualitative commitments by shifting analysis from individual cognition or attitude toward relational fields and material-discursive performativity. Rather than reducing experience to codes, it calls for situated sensing, composing, and tracing of how moods gather and disperse across humans and nonhumans. It invites attention to apparatus design, that is, the arrangements that pattern who can speak, how risk feels, and what counts as evidence or creativity. Posthumanist accountability becomes atmospheric: researchers consider how their presence, tools, and representational choices alter the air of inquiry, and how methods (elicitation prompts, interface choices, room setups) enact agential cuts that change what can be felt and known. In practice, this means designing studies that can register subtle shifts: fieldnotes keyed to tone and tempo, sensory descriptions, media captures of screen rhythms, and diffractive readings that relate these traces to institutional discourses and material constraints.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, atmosphere helps make sense of the lived, affective experience of teaching and learning with language models: the hum of anticipation when a prompt is about to be run; the hush when a model’s response appears; the tension that gathers around academic integrity statements; the lightness or relief when a generative tool helps a stuck writer move. These atmospheres are co-produced by interface affordances (autocomplete flicker, conversational pacing), classroom arrangements (screen sharing, laptop placement), policies (allowable use language), and cultural narratives (media headlines about cheating or job loss). Attending to atmosphere clarifies how authorship feels in the room: whether invention seems possible, whether critique feels dangerous or invited, whether collaboration is sensed as enlivening or as surveillance. It also illuminates how tangible artifacts, such as rubrics emphasizing process, prompts framing model use as invention rather than substitution, revision trails that foreground decision-making, can modulate the air toward curiosity, care, and experimental rigor. Instructors’ reflective accounts, read alongside interface logs and classroom observations, can show how atmospheres tilt pedagogy toward constraint or openness, anxiety or play, suspicion or inquiry, and how small material-discursive adjustments recalibrate the weather of writing with AI.