Short Abstract

This panel considers methodological innovation in exploring climate-related loss and agency. We seek papers addressing tensions between documenting hard-to-quantify loss and listening to agency, centering affected voices, diverse logics of loss, epistemic justice, and cross-disciplinary approaches.

Long Abstract

Climate-related impacts and losses are proliferating, affecting livelihood practices, environmental conditions, social relations, and mobilities, including forced displacement and migration, as well as involuntary immobility. Climate-related losses and damages are understood to be highly personal and context-based, informed by individual and community values, cultures and priorities. They are also intertwined with agency, through individuals, households and communities’ own approaches and strategies to managing or responding to livelihood and mobility challenges. Understanding the interlinking of impacts and agency therefore requires methods that can capture locally anchored, ontologically diverse and highly personal perspectives and experiences.

This panel focuses on methodological innovation in capturing these intersections of impacts and agency, and seeks to explore the tensions and possibilities of fusion between "documenting loss", which is difficult to quantify, and "listening to agency”, which is difficult to standardize. We particularly encourage papers proposing one or more of the following dimensions:

• Concrete methodological reflections around approaches that centre the voices, perspectives and priorities of people who are affected by climate-related losses.

• Contributions to diverse understandings of loss and agency.

• Redressing epistemic injustices, for example through. communication and engagement between researchers, the researched, local actors, practitioners and policymakers.

• Articulating cross- or multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of overlapping and mutually reinforcing vulnerabilities.

• Exploring how migrant and immobilized communities employ political agency and engage structurally with formal or informal governance institutions in response to loss and damage.

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