Short Abstract

The panel investigates how climate-induced environmental transformations reshape mobile populations' (such as pastoralists, fisherfolk or migrant construction workers) emotional lives, affective experiences, sense of ‘home’, and relationships with human and more-than-human actors

Long Abstract

Climate change disproportionately affects many African populations whose livelihoods depend on mobility and outdoor work, including but not limited to pastoralists, fisherfolk, and migrant construction workers. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and other climate-related changes are transforming the natural environments on which these livelihoods depend, altering the availability of vegetation, wildlife, and other key resources and affecting health. While the material and physical consequences of climate change—and the governance and policy responses that often further marginalize these populations—have been extensively studied, far less attention has been paid to its affective dimensions. How do climate-induced environmental transformations reshape people's emotional lives, affective experiences, sense of ‘home’, and relationships with human and more-than-human actors when longstanding environmental knowledge is rendered uncertain or obsolete? What happens when people’s relationship to a place is questioned as places become uninhabitable, unrecognizable or difficult to navigate? This panel invites contributions from scholars across disciplines that explore affective moods, emotions, and atmospheres as collective experiences among mobile populations confronting estrangement from their environments, home, and social worlds in the context of rapid climate change.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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