Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how migrants’ vulnerability to climate impacts – extreme rain and flooding – is constructed, mobilised, and contested in Marseille through an analysis of climate-health policy discourses and early research findings on migrants’ experiences of housing (im)mobility in the city.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how migrants’ vulnerability to climate impacts – extreme rain and flooding in particular – is constructed, mobilised, and contested in Marseille through an analysis of climate-health policy discourses and early research findings on migrants’ experiences of housing (im)mobility in the city. Structured in two parts, we first analysis how national, regional and municipal climate-related policies frame racialised migrants as inherently fragile and often disposable, in ways that echo broader vulnerability discourses of “at-risk” groups and spaces. Such framings typically detach vulnerability from the long colonial histories of racialisation, socio-economic and political neglect and spatial marginalisation that have shaped migrants lives’ – and their housing trajectories in particular. We will explore how climate and flooding policy discourses in particular participate in the reproduction of racialised vulnerabilisation and discrimination, which includes the spatial sorting of migrants into precarious, degraded housing and urban spaces.

We then complicate such narratives of vulnerability and disposability by turning to migrants’ everyday experiences and practices of housing precarity and (im)mobility. Drawing on interviews and photovoice workshops with migrants, we discuss how forms of resistance emerge through collective claims to home and urban spaces, informal solidarities, and everyday practices of survival. These practices can unsettle imaginaries of inevitability regarding migrant (im)mobility and (un)inhabitability. We show how migrants’ practices of home-making have the potentital to open alternative epistemologies of resistance and unsettle hierarchies of (im)mobility in the context of increasing climate change impacts, thereby contributing to critical political ecology debates on climate justice.