Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Zofia Boni
(Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan)
Rebecca Lynch (University of Exeter)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Metabolism links environments & bodies in dynamic relation, both in process of becoming & open to change. The growth of metabolic disease includes those with metabolic-associated liver disease. Its links to both individual behaviour & climate change trouble individual responsibility for the disease.
Paper long abstract
Anthropological work has sought to locate metabolism in people’s everyday lives, socio-cultural practices, and in wider power and structural relations, including in colonial histories of plantation agriculture and global food systems. Healthcare services, themselves part of health environments, are also implicated in metabolism with biomedical interventions (or lack of these) shaping the bodies of patients and structures of services in different ways. Through such studies, metabolism is locally situated, linking environments and bodies in (unhealthy) relation. But metabolism is, by definition, not static, and open to change. One of these changes includes increasing numbers of patients with metabolic-associated liver disease (MASLD), itself a recent re- personal classification. The growth of metabolic disease globally, together with increased exposure to chemical pollutants, and the ‘metabolic turn’ in the biosciences, lead Landecker (2011;2013) to suggest that ‘postindustrial’ metabolism is qualitative different to previous times. Through such examples, metabolic processes stretch beyond individual human bodies to include those of other humans and non-humans (Mol, 2021). Bodies are porous, in process and in dynamic relation to their environments, metabolism stretching across sites, scales, and time. This includes wider environments shifts as more research connects metabolic-associated liver disease not only to individual health behaviours but also climate change, troubling ideas of responsibility for health. Both bodies and environments are in constant process of becoming.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes how the local environments and cultural, intergenerational understandings of temperature and adaptation affect older adults’ physiological reactions to heat in Warsaw and Madrid.
Paper long abstract
Europe is one of the fastest heating continents, due to anthropogenic climate crisis (EEA 2024). In this paper, we want to analyze in what way various cultural, biological and environmental conditions affect people’s experiences of heat, their physiological reactions and adaptation capabilities.
This paper builds on ethnographic research conducted in 2021-2022 in Warsaw (Poland) and Madrid (Spain). We conducted research with adults above 65 years old, who due to both social and biological factors are considered especially vulnerable to heat stress. Our research consisted of participant observation, walk-alongs, interviews and temperature measurements with ten older adults in each city conducted over the summers of 2021 and 2022. We also conducted participatory workshops, focus group interviews and co-created an ethnographic film “La Ola!” in Madrid.
Building on the concept of local biologies (Lock 1993) and situated biologies (Niewöhner and Lock 2018), we want to consider how the local environment and cultural understandings of temperature affect older adults’ biological reactions and embodied experiences of heat. We are interested in the similarities and differences between Warsaw and Madrid. Warsaw historically grappled more with cold, whereas now is forced to adapt to increasing summer heat. Whereas Madrid has a much longer cultural history of managing and adapting to urban heat, but now has to live through 40°C summers. By focusing on older adults’ situated biologies of heat, we want to demonstrate what anthropological research contributes to a more complex understanding of climate change and increasing heat’s effects on people’s health and wellbeing.
Paper short abstract
I explore how, in one of the world’s most polluted capitals, life and health are made sense of and negotiated across societal and professional divides. Through ethnographic analysis, I show how these differences shape uneven experiences of polluted air in a climate where harm is normalised .
Paper long abstract
'It's like my throat is filled with something, it feels very heavy, and also water starts running from my eyes,' an autorickshaw driver recounts how he experiences air pollution in Delhi. Often described as 'toxic haze', 'thick smog', or a 'gas chamber', Delhi's air pollution has been given several names. The phenomenon seems to have become a permanent environmental condition shaping everyday life and health in the city. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork across multiple sites in the city, including sustained engagement with autorickshaw drivers, bus conductors, medical doctors, respiratory patients, students, and activists, I examine how air pollution is embodied, interpreted, and endured.
While some interlocutors articulate pollution through failures of the post-colonial state or neoliberal planning, alongside bodily symptoms like constant coughing and irritation in eyes, others frame exposure as an inevitable compromise. It is something they adapt to or get habitual of, despite bodily symptoms, which they describe as a cost of income, opportunity, or (future) mobility. These different justifications allow me to show how health in a polluted city is shaped by uneven positionalities, situated biologies, and the limits of aspiration. I further show how state responses to air pollution, including the criminalisation of protest and relativising or discrediting scientific data, contribute to a climate in which harm is normalised and responsibility diffused. By conceptualising air as both a material substance and a medium of embodied exposure, I show how living with/in environmental toxicity becomes an ordinary condition of survival rather than collective intervention.
Paper short abstract
Short abstract: The climate crisis gives birth to worries of tick-borne diseases spreading. This paper examines through an ethnographic epidemiology of affect how the fear of tick-borne diseases grows, spreads and influences individual choices, bodies and policies.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how the expanding areas of tick occurrence reveal entanglements between environment, body, and health in the context of the climate crisis. While Lyme disease has long been a subject of controversy, recent shifts in tick ecologies, linked to altered seasonal dynamics and climate change, extended encounters with ticks into peri-urban parks and residential green spaces. Tick hosts, smaller and bigger animals, change their habitation. New species occasionally occur too, such as the “monster tick” Hyaloma marginatum, bringing in a possibility of tropical diseases.
These shifts are not merely biogeographic phenomena, but infuse socio-cultural landscapes with affects. Such affects shape how people perceive risk and govern their bodies in relation to a danger of tick bite and related health concerns. And, through an aura of fear around tick-borne diseases, influence the official policies on national, regional, and local levels too.
The paper draws on an “ethnographic” epidemiology of affects related to ticks and Lyme disease in Poland. Through it I traced how the expanding presence of ticks, and the pathogens they carry, heard about and/or experienced, becomes a visceral axis through which bodies register climate crisis, as inhabitants, park users, or tourists adjust their practices, avoiding certain terrains or monitoring bodily sensations for ticks whenever they are out in nature. By paying attention to their experiences and foregrounding ticksites as embodied ecologies of health and wellbeing, I show how the affective framing of ticks and tick-borne diseases reflects broader tensions over expertise and adaptation to climate change.
Paper short abstract
What happens to vaccinations in a time of more frequent and destructive climate disasters, and in places that bear the brunt of such disasters? To answer this question, I draw from my ethnography on vaccinations in the Philippines in the aftermath of the COVID-19 global public health emergency.
Paper long abstract
What happens to vaccinations in a time of more frequent and destructive climate disasters, and in places that bear the brunt of such disasters? I attend to this question by drawing from my ongoing ethnography at a district health center in urban Philippines, studying how vaccinations are now being perceived, understood, and imagined in the aftermath of the COVID-19 global public health emergency. I situate vaccinations as both practice (i.e., a 'common good' propagated through the contemporary dominance of Western biomedicine) and as program (i.e., a biotechnological intervention instituted by states and health authorities worldwide) within the continuing narrative of climate change in the country. I cite particular cases when natural disasters have impeded the implementation of my ethnographic site's vaccination program, and use these instances to reflect on the effects these disasters have not only on vaccinations per se, but on the broader infrastructure of health in Philippine society and beyond. Ongoing conversations on planetary health, I argue, would be wise to include health interventions like vaccinations in the picture, especially when such interventions are heavily--yet not-so-overtly--impacted by climate disasters--and are crucial to the large-scale prevention of many existing diseases and the emergence of future epidemics.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research on eco-spiritual practices in Spain, this paper examines how embodied and sensorial practices reframe health as a relational and planetary condition, contributing to anthropological debates on bodies, embodiment, and climate change.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how contemporary eco-spiritual practices mobilize bodies and embodied experience to reconfigure understandings of health and human–environment relations in the context of climate crisis. Based on ethnographic research in Spain from 2024, including forest bathing (shinrin-yoku), workshops inspired by Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, and related events, the study addresses the guiding question: how do eco-spiritual practices use the body and senses to produce alternative ontologies of health and care in a changing climate?
Drawing on the anthropological bodily turn, the paper approaches the body as an agentive site of subjectivity and social production (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987). Findings show that eco-spiritualities place the body at the center of ecological and ethical transformation in three ways. First, bodies are cultivated as sites of sensorial knowledge through slow movement, breathing, silence, and affective attunement, resonating with Csordas’s (1993) notion of somatic modes of attention. Second, health is reframed as a relational and planetary condition rather than an individual biomedical state, articulated through imaginaries of the Earth as a living or wounded body that link personal well-being to ecological degradation. Third, these practices generate embodied memories and dispositions interpreted as politically meaningful, fostering responsibility and resilience in the face of climate uncertainty.
By offering an ethnographically grounded analysis of embodied eco-spiritual practices, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on bodies and health in a changing climate, while also showing how attention to embodiment and sensorial knowledge can enrich anthropology’s methods and theoretical frameworks in the study of contemporary ecological transformations.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South India, I explore how coastal transformations map onto physiological and psychological states in vulnerable communities and address these entangled ecological and psycho-physiological coastal erosions as wounds invoked by the local term, coastal dosham
Paper long abstract
Chellanam is among the areas of Kerala, South India that are most severely affected by coastal erosion and flooding. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Chellanam, I trace lived experiences of coastal erosion. I explore how coastal transformations map onto physiological and psychological states in one of Kerala’s most vulnerable communities and address these entangled ecological and psycho-physiological coastal erosions as wounds invoked by the local term, coastal dosham. An Ayurvedic and local imagination of shared trauma, this helps to carve out what it means to think with flows, blockages and imbalances about the multiple interlocking relations of people, minds, bodies and ecologies under conditions of coastal erosion. In doing so, I contribute to the anthropology of coastal erosion and the anthropology of ecological distress.
Paper short abstract
Paper long abstract
The last decade has seen a planetary turn in social and political theory (Clark and Szerszynski 2020, Hui 2024) and in global governance as expressed in planetary health agendas. These agendas have documented the complex ecological and existential threats posed by the anthropogenic triple crisis of climate change and extreme weather, toxic pollution and exposure, and biodiversity and habitat loss/damage, as well as intersections between climate and mental health crises as epitomised by the high prevalence of ecoanxiety. Despite this, comparatively less attention has been given to what an anthropology of ecoanxiety and environ-mental health would look like, in times of planetary disruption. This paper addresses this gap precisely by proposing such an agenda, which would bring health and environmental humanities and ecological and planetary thought into conversation, and by sharing initial findings from my study on ecoanxiety. As such, this paper asks three interrelated questions: if living in an age of planetary dysruption affects virtually every aspect of life, what are these “affects” and emerging climate anxieties made – and capable – of? How do they shape horizons of possibility and experiences of ontological vulnerability (Filipe et al. 2021, Ford et al. 2024)? And, more broadly, how might we pivot the anthropological interest in thinking beyond binaries of body and mind, organism and environment, to reimagine the relations between planetary thinking and earth emotions (Albrecht 2019, Sasser 2023)?