Life, Land, and Anticipated Loss: An Arendtian Lens to Climate-Related Voluntary Immobility
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Keywords: migration, climate change, voluntary immobility, place attachment, home, Arendt
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Elisa Kondo Rudolph, University of Illinois at Chicago
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Abstract
Migration in the context of climate change suffers from oversimplification. In media and advocacy channels, apocalyptic masses of helpless individuals inspire fear and concern. Academic and policy circles, meanwhile, largely consider migration to be a viable adaptation response for vulnerable communities, albeit dangerously engaging in ‘anticipatory ruination,’ the “discursive and material process of social and ecological destruction in anticipation of real or perceived threats” (Paprocki, 2019, p. 296). Yet the voluntary immobile—communities and individuals who choose not to leave—conflict with both accounts, often acting neither as conventional victims nor activists while navigating climactic change to their land and land-tethered identities. This paper seeks to contribute to a fuller understanding of climate-related mobilities, adding to ongoing investigation of the role of place attachment and risk aversion, but uniquely applying an Arendtian lens. Political theorist Hannah Arendt’s writings on home offers a compelling perspective to how the structures we use to reduce the uncertainty in our lives—a roof and bed to call our own, a community of neighbors we trust, familiar landscapes and roads—can be so overwhelmingly important that it lends to an unwillingness to leave, even to the extent of anticipatory self-ruination. Rather than perceive voluntary immobility as an exceptional case when the culture is richer or resources sparser, this paper applies a broader theoretical analysis with critical consideration of the societal outcomes to the refusal to leave, the commitment to living out one’s own life, land, and anticipated loss.
Life, Land, and Anticipated Loss: An Arendtian Lens to Climate-Related Voluntary Immobility
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Paper Abstract