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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how embodied expertise emerges through human–glacier relations in the Swiss Alps. Drawing on multisensory ethnography, it shows how glaciers circulate as intimate companions and political symbols, generating contested ecologies of expertise across local and global scales.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how environmental expertise is produced, negotiated, and unevenly contested through human–glacier relationships in the Swiss Alps, in contexts marked by glacier retreat, symbolic mobility, climate activism, and polarising narratives. Drawing on multisensory ethnography in Switzerland, alongside participant observation of glacier commemorations and funerary rituals, I explore how glaciers circulate as objects of knowledge, affect, and political mobilisation across local and global scales.

I develop the concept of glacial intimacy to analyse contrasting yet coexisting ways of knowing glaciers. For local inhabitants, glaciers are intimate, more-than-human companions embedded in everyday practices and livelihoods; for urban climate activists, they become mobile emblems of planetary crisis, climate justice, and moral urgency. These divergent engagements generate distinct forms of ecological expertise—experiential, scientific, activist, and spiritual—that intersect during mediatised events such as glacier funerals and commemorations. Rather than producing open conflict or epistemic consensus, these encounters reveal parallel environmental imaginaries shaped by different temporalities, mobilities, and regimes of attachment.

By tracing how glaciers move between proximity and distance, intimacy and abstraction, the paper contributes to debates on multispecies mobility and polarisation as epistemic processes. It shows how knowledge about land, climate, and biodiversity is produced not only through data or policy but also through ritual, emotion, sensory engagement, and strategic circulation. The Alps emerge as a site where living with environmental change involves negotiating fragmented ecologies of expertise, in which local lifeworlds and global climate discourses remain relationally connected yet resistant to alignment, with uneven implications for authority.