Building Pyrosocial Worlds Beyond Wastelands

In the present age of climate crisis, the bounds of a single wildfire can span thousands of kilometres, as illustrated by the circumstances in Canadian and US eastern regions in the summer of 2023. The pyrosocial worlds we inhabit today are directly informed by the hierarchical legacies of racial capitalism. This racial capitalism does not simply exist in the broader industrial, economic, and socio-political processes that continue to reproduce it across the earth, but they are also embedded in our forms of study, even forms of study that are intended to address the harms of racial capitalism. Such is the case with institutional fire ecology. However, it is not simply the domains of research and institutional ecological governance structures where the impacts of racial capitalism end. Racial capitalism also exists in our bodies. Not all bodies experience the presence of fires in the same way. Black, Indigenous and people of colour populations are often most affected by health concerns in the aftermaths of wildfires due to factors such as housing insecurity and jobs with heightened occupational hazards, which increase their exposure to wildfire smoke. In this way, even the health impacts of wildfires become racialized. Mindful of these concerns, as well as existing STS interventions in offering new models of care, belonging and relationality as pre-conditions for ethical, regenerative, and robust academic research and the fostering of an academic community, the embodied and affective dimensions, exemplified by sensory and arts-based interventions make important contributions to the traditions of self-reflexivity that STS has long prided itself on. This paper seeks to uncover the worlds of entanglements between wildfires, their empirical study and the embodied arts-based approaches that address emergent forms of understanding and challenges of being with certain aspects of climate change.