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Curated Track: 

Description:

Inherent in climate adaptation projects and planning are singular, elevated visions of how a community, city, or nation-state should grow, develop, and become “adapted”, “sustainable” or “resilient” to the so-called Anthropocene times. The single climate imaginary is the dominant discourse of possibility within mainstream adaptation literature and politics (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011; Nightingale et al. 2020). Indigenous, feminist, and raced ways of knowing and being that may open-up to entirely respectful, care-ful, and mutually nourishing relations, are often dismissed, tokenized, or misrepresented in adaptation-as-usual – a reductionist process that gives way to a singularizing vision of climate futures to the exclusion of infinite possiblities otherwise. Discussions of a radical adaptation otherwise are at the fringes of adaptation theory and practice (Kothari et al. 2019; Lövbrand et al., 20xx; Haverkamp, 2021), if registered at all. Yet, this does not mean that alternatives to the singularizing paradigm do not exist – indeed they do.

While a majority of formal climate change action has been marked by a distinct concentration on scientific, technological and economic approaches to climate and vulnerability, there are a growing number of voices that have contested and resisted totalizing adaptation visions (Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011). From the margins of climate knowledge-making and world-making is an emerging understanding of the need for a future multiple – a pluriversal process of becoming with and through multiple ontologies and multiple epistemologies (Gibson et al., 2015; Escobar 2018), that shifts the universal thinking about the climate problem and opens-up to more than the reproduction of the One-World-World (Law, 2015; Nightingale et al. 2020). Beyond the academy, civil society resistance and social movements such as the Zapatista’s declaration, Sumak Kawsay, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous resistance (#NoDapl, Resist Line 3, #LandBack) among many other anti-colonial, anti-extractive and anti-racist projects carry forward imaginaries that desire and envision worlds otherwise.

To this session, we invite papers that speak to the contours, structural mechanisms and tactics through which singularizing and hegemonic adaptation discourse, projects and practices are performed; as well as papers that dare to radically (re)imagine adaptation otherwise, gathering examples of climate adaptation that are beyond the design fallacies of colonial, capitalist and Enlightenment reason. We particularly seek scholar-activist works that incorporate Indigenous, feminist, and raced ways of knowing and being that are being ‘imagined’ and ‘coproduced’ with inidividuals beyond the academy. Papers may address questions such as: whose worlds, and what kind of worlds come to matter and materialize in adaptation design (policy and planning)? Whose situated knowledges, realities, and ideologies legitimize adaptation visions and their material interventions? In what ways are totalizing adaptation processes being challenged by subversive, feminist, pluriversal, or otherwise politics and movements? How might the multiplicity of adaptation proposals support a more radical ecological democratic approach to adaptation planning processes? How might we conceptualize and enact adaptation otherwise?

References:
Escobar, A. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press, 2018.

Gibson, K, et al. Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene. Punctum Books, 2015.

Haverkamp, J. “Collaborative Survival and the Politics of Livability: Towards Adaptation Otherwise.” World Development, vol. 137, Jan. 2021, p. 105152, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105152.

Law, J. “What’s Wrong with a One-World World?” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, vol. 16, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 126–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1020066.

Nightingale, A. J., et al. “Beyond Technical Fixes: Climate Solutions and the Great Derangement.” Climate and Development, vol. 12, no. 4, Apr. 2020, pp. 343–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1624495.

Yusoff, K., and J. Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” WIREs Climate Change, vol. 2, no. 4, 2011, pp. 516–34, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.117.

Non-Presenting Participants