Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how ‘unruly’ survivors challenge dominant framings of urgency in climate discourse. Urgency is often presumed in disaster responses—swift action appears inevitable. Yet, such narratives rarely question whose interests are prioritised and what rhetorics underpin rapid responses.

Presentation long abstract

This paper draws attention to a less explored, temporal aspect of climate-induced disasters: how ‘unruly’ survivors of disasters challenge dominant framings of urgency in climate discourse. On 30 July 2024, a hillock in the Western Ghats of Kerala, India, broke off, triggering a landslide that claimed 400 lives. The disaster stemmed from a complex interaction of unchecked human settlement, climate change and historical interventions in a fragile ecology. In response, the Kerala government announced multi-million-rupee townships as the resettlement plan, declaring the landslide zone uninhabitable. Most of the survivors, who were settler tea-plantation workers, accepted the plan. However, Adivasi families that were also affected refused to become beneficiaries of the plan. These unruly survivors defied state agents warning them of losing out and highlighted what relocation would cost them – forest rights, access to minor forest products, sacred groves and ancestral graves. Their refusal slowed down state action and served as a protest against state efforts to move Adivasis outside forests, earlier on conservation pretexts and now in the name of climate change. Drawing on historically informed ethnography, this paper brings out how urgency is often presumed in climate disaster responses—swift action is seen as both necessary and inevitable. Yet, such narratives rarely interrogate whose interests are prioritised and what justificatory rhetorics underpin these rapid responses. The paper thereby demonstrates how climate urgency narratives admit affects selectively—in the Kerala case, foregrounding settler grief, loss, worry and aspiration, while marginalising Adivasi concerns rooted in displacement, cultural erasure, and historical injustice.