Towards an ontological reading of 'climate mobility'

Speaker: Prof. Andrew Baldwin, Durham University
Series: Geographies of Knowledge - Department of Geography
Admission (organiser's words): All welcome; for those unsure of room location please visit reception or email [email protected]
Note: All welcome; for those unsure of room location please visit reception or email [email protected]

Over the last two decades, researchers have approached climate mobility primarily as an epistemological problem: a question of how best to know, represent and govern those made mobile by the geophysical impacts of climate change. The paper breaks with this well-established convention. It approaches climate mobility instead as an ontological problem: a more fundamental question about what climate mobility is and what it can tell us about being human today. The paper poses this question at a crucial moment in our planetary history when capitalism is undergoing an epochal transition in the face of geopolitical realignment, climatic instability and rapid technological change. Amid these challenges old certainties about what it is to be human are being undone. The paper opens fresh theoretical ground in the fields of climate justice, environmental humanities and political theory by asking what an ontological reading of climate mobility can tell us about shifting ideas of difference, nature and the human, as capitalism adapts to the multiple crises that comprise the post-Atlantic conjuncture. The first part of the paper suggests that at stake in the growing epistemic community of climate mobility research and governance is the repetition of a long-standing modernist ontology that rests on a primary distinction between nature and society. The central claim is that hegemonic forms of climate mobility research, including that assembled by the IPCC, draw on this modernist ontology. Against this first account, the paper develops a second, relational account of climate mobility in which the figure of climate mobility is approached not as a bounded entity whose cause lies outside itself whether history or climate or both, but one whose myriad expressions cannot be decoupled from the socio-technical regimes from which they are composed.