Presentation short abstract

Focusing on how people working in the primary sector in Galicia (Spain) experience variegated climate impacts, this paper elaborates a post-Foucaultian approach to the analysis of what people do, can do and reject to do with the notion of climate change on the face of multiple environmental changes

Presentation long abstract

Climate change is now an everyday experience. Yet, quite often, it remains epistemologically elusive when we try to track it down while doing fieldwork on everyday climate change encounters. Why is it so obvious for some people to connect the experience of ongoing and accelerated environmental changes with the idea of global warming , while it is unclear, confusing or even goes without mention for many other people undergoing the very same changes? In this paper, I analyse how people working in the primary sector in Galicia (NW Spain) come across a changing environment and the way the notion of climate change enters discourses and practices about encounters, vulnerabilities, limits, actions and consequences. Building on long term discussions of the notion of environmentality and the issue of (environmental) subject formation, my aim is to elaborate a post-Foucaultian approach to the way people start to think of themselves and their own actions and experiences in terms of climate change. I suggest that a phenomenological elaboration of the term “climate subject” opens up very productive possibilities for the analysis of what people do, can do and reject to do with the notion of climate change on the face of multiple ̶ some of them extreme and devastating, some of them subtle and even temporary benign— environmental changes.