Defense Date
8-27-2026
Graduation Date
Winter 12-18-2026
Availability
Immediate Access
Submission Type
dissertation
Degree Name
PhD
Department
Psychology
School
McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts
Committee Chair
Leswin Laubscher
Committee Member
Jessie Goicoechea
Committee Member
Jamieson Webster
Keywords
breathlessness, critical hermeneutic phenomenology, environmental racism, sociogeny, necropolitcs, body schema, Clairton Pennsylvania, industrial pollution, decolonial psychoanalysis, clinical psychology
Abstract
This dissertation asks what it means to lose one’s breath under conditions of structural violence, and what clinical psychology has failed to hear when it has treated that breathlessness as a symptom to be managed rather than testimony to be received. Drawing on critical hermeneutic phenomenology, embodied phenomenology, and decolonial theory, this study offers a sustained account of what it means to live with asthma in Clairton, Pennsylvania, where the air has been made unbreathable by over a century of industrial coke production at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works.
Five women living with asthma in Clairton agreed to speak about their experience of breathlessness. Their accounts were gathered through in-depth interviews analyzed using van Manen’s (1997) hermeneutic phenomenological method. The study’s guiding question was not what asthma is clinically, but what oppressive breathlessness is as a way of being-in-the-world: how it reorganizes the lived body, lived space, lived time, and lived relations with others for those whose breathlessness is structural, the predictable consequence of decisions made about whose air it is acceptable to contaminate.
The findings present oppressive breathlessness through four existential dimensions: a body calibrated to survival rather than health; a space organized around respiratory risk rather than possibility; a time colonized by anticipated crisis; and a relational world from which breathlessness progressively withdraws the body.
Drawing on Fanon’s sociogeny, Mbembe’s necropolitics, and decolonial psychoanalytic frameworks, the study proposes a necessary inversion: in Clairton, breathlessness does not originate in the body. It originates in the world. Breath does not fail because the body is defective. It fails because the world has been engineered, with intention and for profit, to make it fail. This dissertation argues that clinical psychology has an obligation to develop frameworks adequate to receiving that testimony, not only treating the symptoms that structural violence produces, but naming the structures that produce them.
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Lampe, A. (2026). Oppressive Breathlessness: A Critical, Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of Asthma in Clairton, PA (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/2472