Format/Structure

This workshop aims to foster a conversation on climate change research through the lens of slow disaster in the Mediterranean. Together, we will discuss the current approaches to risk, resilience, and adaptation miss, and collectively develop grounded research agendas that can address these gaps.

Long Abstract

Climate change is often approached through moments of acute crisis and sudden disruption. Yet for many communities, climate change is lived as a slow disaster: uneven, cumulative, and deeply entangled with histories of inequality, dispossession, militarization, and political economy. In SWANA, this is especially urgent at a time when ongoing war, siege, and bombardment are not separate from environmental crisis, but intensify forms of destruction, displacement, infrastructural collapse, and toxic exposure. This workshop creates an open space to think together about how climate-related research engages, and often fails to engage, with slow disaster and war ecologies, and what dominant framings of climate change as risk, resilience, and adaptation leave out.

Rather than presenting finished papers or solutions, the workshop is structured as a collective conversation. We will reflect on how dominant frameworks of risk and resilience privilege measurability, technocratic intervention, and short time horizons, while overlooking lived uncertainty, social reproduction, infrastructural violence, and the everyday labor of endurance, care, and resilience. Participants are invited to share frustrations, gaps, and questions emerging from their own research, fieldwork, or organizing experiences.

A central aim is to ask: what kinds of knowledge are missing from current climate research, and why? How do power, funding structures, and institutional expectations shape what counts as “risk” or “successful adaptation”? And how might we imagine research agendas that are slower, more relational, and more attentive to structural violence and socio-ecological conditions?

The workshop is intentionally interdisciplinary and exploratory. It is meant as a starting point for building connections, surfacing shared concerns, and collectively sketching new directions for research on climate change, slow disaster, and socio-ecological risk.