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Accepted Paper:
Climate change and the imagination
Alex Arnall
(University of Reading)
In the context of the Anthropocene, this presentation explores key imaginative framings of climate change concerning futurity, everyday practice and the operation of climate science. It illustrates these framings using the case of Fairbourne, a coastal community in North Wales whose residents have b
Paper long abstract:
It is often said that, in the Anthropocene, we are in urgent need of finding new ways to imagine human-nature relations. The aim of my presentation is to explore what this argument means in relation to climate change and sea level rise. Specifically, I examine three key imaginative framings of climate change: 1) the futurity of climate change; 2) embedding climate change in everyday practice; and 3) practices of climate science. I illustrate these framings using the case of Fairbourne, a coastal village in North Wales that is threatened by sea level rise and where the population has been dubbed the ‘UK’s first climate change refugees’. Although scientists and policymakers anticipate that Fairbourne will be uninhabitable within the next few decades due to coastal erosion and flooding, the village’s residents contest the imagined destruction of their village. Instead, they represent and perform Fairbourne as a thriving community with a viable long-term future. Overall, my presentation highlights the key role of imagination in anticipating and imagining climate change futures and emphasises that that such futures are never settled but always in the making and always contested.