Presentation short abstract

Photovoice with Majority World migrants in Dublin reveals how persistent rain and damp housing become embodied forms of climate injustice, shaping health, everyday life, and migrant-led adaptations in the inner city.

Presentation long abstract

Persistent rain and damp are emerging as defining climate stresses in Dublin, where 2023 marked the wettest year on record. However the climate-health impacts of persistent rain receive little attention in adaptation discourse compared to high-magnitude flooding events. These slow-onset weather patterns intersect sharply with Dublin’s housing crisis, particularly in the inner city where many Majority World migrants are confined to the private rental sector. Here, expensive, poorly insulated, and overcrowded dwellings mean rain is felt not only outdoors but inside the home, through damp, mould, condensation, cold, and the embodied strain of living in conditions that harm human health.

This paper uses photovoice to explore how Majority World migrants perceive and navigate, and adapt to persistent rain and damp living conditions. Drawing on an embodied political ecology framework, the study examines how climatic forces become materially and affectively inscribed in bodies, homes, and everyday practices, and how these embodied experiences are compound with pre-existing vulnerabilities such as discrimination employment, legal status, and unequal urban development. Photovoice images and narratives reveal how participants interpret dampness as both a physical health risk and a lived expression of social exclusion.

This project foregrounds the situated knowledges, and adaptive practices that residents develop in response to chronic rain and deteriorating housing conditions. By centring embodied experience through participant-produced visual methods, the paper advances debates in urban climate justice and argues for adaptation strategies in Dublin that include persistent rain as a factor, and that meaningfully incorporate migrant perspectives into more equitable climate futures.