We are delighted to announce the following chair's plenary lectures and panels at the conference, convened by Professor Harriet Bulkeley and relating to her chosen theme of Climate changed geographies.
Tuesday 29 August
Chair's opening plenary panel: just transitions and the road to net zero
18.00-19.15 BST
Across the world governments, cities, businesses and civil society organisations are committing to net zero. This panel discussion will explore how issues of justice are shaping the road to net zero and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Panellists will share their reflections and engage with the audience in discussing these issues through Q&A led by the Chair.
Chair: Harriet Bulkeley, Conference Chair (Durham University, UK)
Panellists: Diana Liverman (University of Arizona, USA), Sam Mason (Public and Communications Union, UK), and Matthew Paterson (University of Manchester, UK)
Wednesday 30 August
As part of our experiments this year with hubs, on Wednesday 30 August we are hosting an international collaborative plenary. Over the course of the day, we will host three plenary sessions, with speakers joining from around the globe.
Critical geographies of climate knowledges
08.00 – 09.45 BST
RGS-IBG London and Melbourne Universities Collective (local Melbourne time 17.00 – 18.45)
Chairs: Cathy Oke (University of Melbourne, Australia) and Harriet Bulkeley, Conference Chair (Durham University, UK)
Plenary speakers: Svenja Keele (Monash University, Australia), joining from Melbourne and Lauren Rickards (La Trobe University, Australia), joining from London.
Local sites of far-reaching climate knowledges: Critical geographies of adaptation work
The situated character of climate change knowledges is well recognised, most often with an emphasis on the specificities of local geographical areas and communities. However, this approach leaves unexamined spaces in which influential climate change information is often constituted; specifically the offices and workplaces in which climate change risk is being framed, calculated and sanitised. In this combined presentation, we explore two interconnected sites of such knowledge generation in Australia – government bureaucracy and private sector consultancies – which together produce a distinctive form of climate change knowledge that is being naturalised both socially and statistically across climate adaptation activities. While governments and consultancies are diverse, overall the knowledge work going on in these sites is cultivating a very particular account of climate change risk – one that is arguably self-interested, bordered and top-down. Combined with the socioeconomic and political influence of the actors involved and the associated homogenising effect across societies, this knowledge work contributes to tight ties between the politics of climate (in)action, an increasingly financialised climate capitalism and the legacies of related governing norms, notably managerialism. More broadly, this ordering of climate change may work against the sort of plurality that Andrea Nightingale and others rightly assert is needed. We conclude with reflections about what this means for academics, especially geographers, in Australia and beyond, and how we can work with the public and private sectors while opening up, not narrowing down, climate change responses.
Discussants: Peter Forman (Northumbria University and Chair of the Energy Geographies Research Group of the RGS-IBG) and Robyn Bartel (Monash University, Australia)
Biographies
Cathy Oke is Melbourne Enterprise Principal Fellow in Informed Cities in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, and Deputy Director (Strategy and Operations) for Melbourne Centre for Cities. She has noteworthy international and local expertise in sustainable, resilient and liveable cities. Cathy's research interests focus on the interaction between urban nature and climate - research, policy and practice - for greater impact in cities. She is Senior Advisor to the Innovate4Cities program of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and is Research Portfolio holder on ICLEI's (Local Governments for Sustainability)
Svenja Keele is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Monash University, Australia. Her research and teaching engage with the political and economic dimensions of climate change adaptation and related challenges, including disaster resilience and energy transitions. In her works she critically examines the way experts, government and business interact to shape policy choices and create new frontiers for investment and innovation. Svenja's recent research has addressed the implications of a rapid growth in the climate consulting sector, the state of adaptation research and policy in Australia, and the urban development mechanisms that are creating maladaptive pressures in cities around the world.
Lauren Rickards is a human geographer and ecologist by training, now working primarily on climate change futures and related questions about the urban-rural and human-nature relationship. Lauren conducts research on many of the social dimensions of climate change, particularly in the water and agri-food sectors and with collaborators in other disciplines and organisations. Her work includes advising a wide range of groups in government, business and the NGO sector on climate change issues as well as being a Lead Author with the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change. Within RMIT, she has been working with others to support critical and purposeful engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and questions of research impact.
Peter Forman is an assistant professor in human geography at Northumbria University and the current chair of the Energy Geographies Research Group (EnGRG). His work brings together research on energy systems, risk governance, and infrastructural politics to understand the significance of energy systems for the organisation of contemporary life. His current research critically examines the calculation and mitigation of risk within proposals to decarbonise domestic and commercial heating networks through the production, transport, storage, and consumption of hydrogen, and the consequences of these proposals for the shaping of urban space.
Robyn Bartel is Professor of Human Geography at Monash University, Adjunct Professor at the University of New England, and is interested in legal diversity and the relationships between legal systems and location, particularly environmental regulation and policy, natural resource management, and place agency. Robyn has a multi-disciplinary background in law, science and higher education and has recently served in the role of President of the Institute of Australian Geographers.
Crisis of imagination / (re)imaginations for (climate) crisis
11.00 – 12.45 BST
RGS-IBG London and Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru (local time 15.30 – 17.15) and African Centre for Cities/British Institute Hub (local time 13.00 – 14.45)
Chairs: Harriet Bulkeley, Conference Chair (Durham University, UK)
Plenary speakers: Chandni Singh (Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India), Lauren Hermanus (African Centre for Cities (ACC)) and Ankit Kumar (University of Sheffield, UK)
Is social research and policy on climate change facing a crisis of imagination? Climate change puts in front of us a wicked problem that is exemplified by a simultaneously hyperconnected and massively fractured/divided globalised world. In the current moment, both climate change mitigation and adaptation overlap with the simultaneous emergence of populism, nationalism, securitisation, and bordering. At the same time, progressive global negotiations on climate change fail to deliver substantial changes. A question that many social scientists of climate change struggle with is if and how they can meaningfully conduct research on something that is only climate change. At the same time, a question for social scientists that do not study climate change is if and how they can leave out climate change. For experiences of changing climate are co-constituted by and co-constitute every aspect of our daily lives. Do we need to (re)imagine things differently in this new and progressively different, co-constituted world? Before that, what will this world progressively look like, beyond the dominant imaginaries hegemonized by utopian techno-fixes? What is the role of social scientists of climate change and social scientists beyond climate change in this crisis of imagination? If we do need (re)imaginations for (climate) crisis, then how would Geographers, who are experts in Earth-Writing, respond with new stories of/for ‘the Earth’.
Discussants: Wangui Kimari (University of Cape Town, South Africa), Lalitha Kamath (TISS Mumbai, India) and Mark Pelling (University College London, UK)
Biographies
Chandni Singh is a Senior Research Consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. She works at the interface of climate change and development in rural and urban geographies within the global South. Chandni is a Lead Author of the IPCC’s Assessment Report 6 in 2022 on ‘Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability’ and a Contributing Author of the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on 1.5°C.
Lauren Hermanus works at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) and focuses on sustainable energy innovation, urban resilience and green economic development. Lauren is the founder of Adapt, a consultancy that responds to the need for alternatives to the rigidity of template-driven advisory services for sustainable development.
Ankit Kumar is a lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. He inquires about climate justice questions at the nexus of culture, knowledge and politics, drawing from postcolonial/anticolonial studies, critical development studies and environmental geographies.
Wangui Kimari is a lecturer at the American University Center in Nairobi, and an honorary research associate at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. She is also the participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), a community-based organization in Mathare, Kenya. Her work draws on local histories and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches – including oral narratives and the Black radical tradition – to think through formal urban planning interventions in African cities.
Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her first book was a co-edited volume titled Participolis: Consent and Contention in Neoliberal Urban Governance that focused on a critical exploration of emerging discourses and practices of 'citizen participation' that have become part of urban governance reforms and infrastructure projects in India. Her later work has focused both on the violence and dispossession of property urbanism in the global south on racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines, but also the bottom-up agency of marginalised groups in unsettling dominant urbanisms. As part of this work, she is engaged in ethnographic study of two kinds of urban frontiers – peripheries and coasts in Mumbai.
Mark Pelling is Professor of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London. His research focuses on social and political aspects of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction, mainly in urban contexts and often in Low and Middle Income Countries, with an increasing focus on working across global South–North contexts. Mark has been a Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th and 6th Assessment Report and its Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. International service also includes the Development Team of the International Science Council RISK Knowledge Action Network and acting as UK representative on the UNDRR European Science and Technology Advisory Group.
Critical geographies of climate justice futures
17.00 – 18.45 BST
RGS-IBG London, UCLA (local time 9.00 – 10.45) and Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia (local time 12.00 – 13.45).
Chairs: Harriet Bulkeley, Conference Chair
Plenary speakers: Kian Goh (UCLA), Alejandro Camargo (UdN), Kasia Paprocki (LSE)
Climate changes struggles for space
Kian Goh
For decades now, critical geographers have reconceptualised space. Framing it beyond physicality per se and towards the social production of space, they’ve opened up productive areas of thought such as the political ecology of space and spatial justice. With climate change, such explorations require revision. Discourses of global environmental change and planetary boundaries have reasserted the biophysicality of space, a sort of 'natural' 'realness' of it all. For critical geography, this requires inquiring more deliberately into the biophysical processes underlying global climate change, its operational scales, and the social struggles constrained by or co-constituted with particular biophysical processes. In particular, it invites a critical inquiry into the levers of socioecological change. This talk poses some key questions and tentative answers. How do we understand the spatial scales of socioecological movements? What are the boundaries of activism associated with particular biophysical conditions? How do we conceive of appropriate modes of governance for more just configurations of intertwined biophysical and social space?
On knowledge and justice: conversations from a climate frontier
Alejandro Camargo and The La Mojana Hub
What knowledges are produced and mobilised in places where the biophysical and bureaucratic forces of climate change have transformed and disrupted everyday life? In this session, we bring together the voices of high school students and teachers, fisherwomen and fishermen, social scientists and engineers to collectively reflect about the role of knowledge production and circulation in the experience of inhabiting a climate frontier. We will talk from the La Mojana inland delta in Northern Colombia, a highly dynamic environment where seasonal flooding shapes the landscape and social life. In 2010, however, the La Niña phenomenon exacerbated flooding to a disastrous level destroying agricultural lands, rural houses, and undermining agrarian life. Scientific and political concerns about the abrupt effects of flooding in La Mojana have turned this region into a new frontier for global climate adaptation. With the financial and technical support of international institutions, scientists, development agents, and government officials have come to La Mojana to reimagine the region and transform both the landscape and rural people’s everyday practices in light of climate change adaptation. In so doing, they have also produced and disseminated knowledge about water, risk, wetland restoration, and adaptation among communities. For the people of La Mojana, the experience of living in a floodplain is also intertwined with experiences of environmental and social injustices. The pollution of rivers and wetlands with mercury and other toxic substances coming from mining and commercial crop production, the decay of fisheries, and the unequal distribution of land pose serious challenges to rural livelihoods. In the meantime, students, teachers, fishers, and other people produce and repurpose different forms of knowledge to make La Mojana an inhabitable place and to imagine a different future in an ever changing world.
The social life of climate change: centring power in the study of climate futures
Kasia Paprocki
The geography of climate change should start with an examination of struggles for justice. This suggests we reframe our understanding of the kind of problem climate change is, from one of carbon to one of power. Doing so brings into sharper relief the stakes, uneven outcomes, and possibilities that comprise a climate-changed world: what we might call the social life of climate change. Centring justice in our study of climate change amounts to a radically different orientation toward how we engage with communities and ecologies. It opens up an examination of how the idea of climate change shapes social worlds in the present. It also commits us to understanding how historical and existing power relations shape the experience of climate and environmental change as well as strategies for responding to these changes. These understandings can be used as a fulcrum for imagining more just climate futures.
Discussants: Liz Koslov (UCLA) and Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero (Utrecht University)
Biographies
Alejandro Camargo is an assistant professor at the Department of History and Social Sciences at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. He’s broadly interested in people-nature relationships in fluvial environments. He has conducted research about conflicts over property rights in wetland areas, the environmental history of agrarian reform, the politics of climate change adaptation in flood-prone landscapes, and the social life of fluvial sediment.
Kasia Paprocki is Associate Professor in Environment in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She teaches and writes on the political ecology of development and agrarian change and is the author of Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell University Press 2021).
Kian Goh is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She researches the relationships between urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilisation in the context of climate change and global urbanization. She is the author of Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021).
Liz Koslov is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Environment and Sustainability, and Sociology at UCLA. Prior to joining UCLA, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT and she holds a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. Her work studies the struggles over urban space in the context of climate change, as well as the conceptualisation and experience of climate-linked displacement, relocation, and migration. She is in the process of writing a book about 'managed retreat' from places exposed to extreme weather and sea-level rise, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork following the community-organized home buyout process in New York City after Hurricane Sandy.
Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Urban Governance in the Global South. She holds a doctorate in human geography from Université de Montréal. Her research has a specific focus on cities, infrastructure, state power and water. She addresses these questions by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different relations and histories that are reflected in access to (and exclusion from) water supply, sanitation, and drainage. While her work comes under the sub-disciplines of political ecology and water governance, it also examines a broad range of questions related to socio-technical networks, state formation, and citizenship.
Friday 1 September
Chair's plenary panel: Can Creativity Save Us? Artistic research, Critical Practice and Sustainability
13.10-13.55
How can the intersection of artistic research, geography, and sustainability research lead to new approaches that reflect on climate justice? Climate researchers collaborate with artists and adapt artistic processes whilst artist take on ecological themes. This panel debates to what extent the arts can generate sustainable ecological effects or influence culture through thematic debate. Can artistic research question the structures of production through critical practice and what kind of knowledge generation is produced?
Chair: Angela Chan (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Panellists: Johannes Stripple (Lund University, Sweden), Matthew Shaw (Scanlab Projects), and Sasha Engelmann (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Biographies
Johannes Stripple is an Associate Professor in Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. In the last years, Johannes has worked on environmental futures: how they are envisioned and how they could be imagined differently. Johannes has developed a range of initiatives that through narratives and speculative design unlock imagination and allows for encounters with sustainable futures. Examples of these are travel guides to real and fictional post-fossil cities and regions. Rough Planet Notterdam is set in a (fictional) European city. Good Guide Skellefteå is set in the Swedish high north, and Zero Carbon Skåne is set in the region of Scania in 2050. The Museum of Carbon Ruins is an exhibition of the fossil era (1850 – 2050). It is staged as a historic museum from the future, and invites its visitors to imagine the transition to a post- fossil world. Carbon Ruins is a concept that has been displayed a physical museeum, mobile museum, digital app, and performance. Johannes has also done two soundwalks that use audiovisual place-specific storytelling to facilitate the imagination. Memories from the Transition is set in Malmö 2030-50 and Farewell Falsterbo is set in the south of Sweden in 2072, but narrate events over a few decades. Finally, LU375 was about imagining the future of the university through a fictional issue of the university magazine LUM, set in 2041.