Ageing with chronic breathlessness: A more-than-human assemblage perspective

This article rethinks ageing with chronic breathlessness through a posthuman and postphenomenological lens, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among older adults with chronic respiratory disease in northern England. The article conceptualises breathlessness not solely as a biomedical symptom but as a sociomaterial assemblage involving human bodies, medical technologies, environments, and more-than-human companions. Support groups are likewise framed as assemblages that co-produce care through interactions among people, spaces, objects, and infrastructures. Building on feminist posthumanist theory and postphenomenology, the article explores how medical devices become embodied extensions of ageing bodies, how environmental and infrastructural factors mediate breath, and how multispecies relationships-pets, plants, even microbes-participate in care. The analysis demonstrates that chronic breathlessness emerges in entanglement with the world, not within isolated individuals, and that care practices are distributed across human and non-human actors. This approach challenges human-centred framings of ageing and illness, contributing to an expanded gerontological paradigm that recognises ageing as a relational and more-than-human process. The findings carry implications for care practices, support group design, and theoretical frameworks in ageing studies.