Short Abstract

Amid deepening environmental divides, this roundtable traces how imaginaries of nature are mobilised across political and local arenas, inviting anthropological debate on the making of truth, identity, and authority in an age of planetary crisis.

Long Abstract

This roundtable delves into the fault-lines of contemporary climate politics, tracing how adaptation and mitigation efforts become battlegrounds in wider imaginaries of nature. Human-induced climate change is displacing people, making unliveable conditions and forcing new weather extremes. Future impacts are being anticipated by a wide range of groups and communities, using terms such as collapse, tipping points and just transitions. At the same time, climate scepticism and resistance to action pervades, becoming imbued with far-right nationalist and anti-regulation movements. Within this charged atmosphere, notions of nature are mobilised by far-right actors and grassroots movements alike – each claiming authenticity, sovereignty and belonging.

In this roundtable we seek proposals from researchers studying this polarised space. We welcome work focusing on activist groups and sceptic movements, but also research that looks at how everyday people, institutions and communities – who may not be part of any organised group – access, navigate or are shaped by this divide. In what ways are ideas of nature, planet and belonging harnessed by political movements, local actors and global coalitions? Do these fault-lines map neatly onto traditional left–right binaries, or do they demand more complex, multidimensional frameworks of antagonistic truth-making? We particularly encourage discussion on where unexpected correlations, convergences or shared anxieties might emerge, potentially generating unlikely alliances and shared agendas in a world of environmental extremes. By exploring these questions, the session aims to chart fresh trajectories for understanding the contested landscapes of environment, power and identity on a polarised planet.

This Roundtable has 2 pending contribution proposals.
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