Regaining the liveability of place: emancipatory futures under climate risk

Objective

This research investigates how individual transformations in response to a changing climate alter perceptions of habitability in at risk places. By evaluating how individuals react to and understand these changes, this work provides concrete entry points for engaging climate-affected and low-income populations in climate change action. Further, by engaging with the idea of transformation, the project rejects narratives that accept the current socio-economic conditions as necessarily extending into the future. Rather, it focuses on the emotional labour and psychological burden of living with climate risk and interrogates how non-material losses (particularly fear, grief and disempowerment) can be leveraged to reduce current and future vulnerability. The project engages Campbell et al’s (2018) concept of bleak optimism – the agency we acquire when we start learning to accept and live with climate change - to advance understanding of individual transformation in the context of climate change and to identify ways to address emotional and psychological barriers to habitability. Drawing on Freirean praxis to understand how people can shift their perspectives, and drawing on Massey’s theories of a progressive sense of place to find entry points for engagement, the project advances a framework to enact bleak optimism. Employing qualitative methodologies, including arts-based practices, community mapping and ethnography, the project takes an international comparative approach, working with low-income and politically marginalised groups in three locations. Cases are identified where government actors are undertaking transformational adaptation in response to floods (Durban, South Africa and Lismore, Australia), and costal erosion (Happisburgh, UK). The project advances adaptation theory by developing the role of place in individual transformation; and shifting narratives around climate-induced place change to present emancipatory, rather than foreclosed, futures.