Outside the Climatic Environmental Bubble: Sensing Climate Change at the Margins

Recent scholarship has argued that the effects of climate change are embodied and felt in quotidian realities. These developments depart from dominant bureaucratic, numerical, and meteorological approaches. This panel revisits and takes Erik Cohen’s notion of the climatic environmental bubble as a point of departure. Cohen’s concept helps to illustrate how social actors use “micro-modifications of the climatic conditions” around them to protect themselves from the deleterious sensory effects of the climate crisis. However, such protection hinges on the comprehensiveness of the climatic environmental bubble, which, in turn, is affected by “factors like social class, migratory status, and possibly also gender”. This panel is thus interested in questions that include but are not limited to: How are the sensory inequalities of climate change differentially experienced across gendered, classed, racialised, and other marginalised social positions? How does the climate crisis unequally unsettle the various established sensory scripts through which everyday life is organised, from foodways and food security to seasonal rhythms and practices of thermal adaptation? How can sensory knowledge complement meteorological data to reveal climate vulnerability? How can this knowledge contribute to climate justice and equitable climate governance? We invite theoretical, methodological, applied, and empirical accounts that broadly consider how the climate crisis is sensed outside this climatic environmental bubble across diverse regional contexts.

Cohen, E. (2018). Climatic Environmental Bubbles and Social Inequalities. In K.E.Y. Low & D. Kalekin-Fishman (Eds.), Senses in Cities: Experiences of Urban Settings (pp. 11-24). Routledge