Short Abstract

This panel seeks ethnographic contributions that interrogate relationships between bodies, health and environments in the context of climate crisis. We are interested both in how anthropology may contribute to this field and how such work may contribute to anthropology.

Long Abstract

The study of relationships between bodies, health, and environments is of increasing interest within anthropology and beyond. Approaches to this topic within anthropology go back some decades, including examining these through notions of local or situated biologies (Lock, 1993; Niewöhner and Lock, 2018), biological citizenship (Petryna, 2002), embodiment and embodied ecologies (Ford, 2019; Mandler et al., 2025; Boni et al., 2025), metabolic living, processes, and absorption (Solomon, 2016; Landecker, 2013, 2023) and planetary health (Nading, 2025). Such work draws on grounded ethnographic analysis as well as engaging with bioscientific understandings and terminology.

However, interrogating entanglements between environments, bodies, and health have become more urgent in the context of climate crisis and its devastating effects not only on the planet, but also, and relatedly, on human health. Environmental changes impact health both through slow incremental modifications (such as toxicity levels and associated metabolic shifts), and immediate threats (e.g. fires, heatwaves, or floods). These effects are not distributed equally and often exacerbate existing socio-economic and geographical inequalities. A recent scientific and political shift in focus from climate change mitigation to adaptation further expects some of the most affected groups to remain or become 'resilient'. Such expectations placed on individual bodies and whole communities, and related narratives and practices, demand critical anthropological investigation.

Our panel seeks theoretically grounded and ethnographically rich papers that discuss anthropological contributions to the analysis of health and bodies in a changing climate, and how such work may contribute to anthropology of/in the contemporary.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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