Paper short abstract:

Exploring the relationship between climate change-induced mobilities, solastalgia and place attachments in migrant communities living through place alterations in the Anthropocene

Paper long abstract:

This paper will present a new PhD project with Wageningen University's Cultural Geography Group about the dynamics of place attachment among populations that, affected by climate change-induced alterations in their immediate environments, fear or have experienced displacement resulting from such alterations. Macro-structural representations of the relationships between migration and climate change as linear and uni-causal leave place-based experience largely unaccounted for in academic, policy and public debates. Given the intrinsic link between place and culture, the project will deploy the concept of solastalgia -- the lived experience of cultural as well as physical and psychological loss due to landscape transformations (Fried, 2000) -- to offer a novel perspective on the ways in which local inhabitants' views, responses and adaptations to climate change emerge (Adger et al., 2012). In doing so, this study responds to calls within the field for humanizing, micro-level readings, facilitating an improved understanding of the role of place and culture in the relationship between climate change and migration across academic boundaries (Hugo, 2008; McAdam, 2010). Utilising interviewing and ethnographic research to investigate differences between those who have stayed in areas affected by climate change, and those who migrate due to its impact will allow a critical dissection of attachment and the idea of 'home', as imagined ideas of 'place' become severed from reality (Albrecht, 2005). Thus, this paper seeks to assert the importance of place in building localized, grassroots responses to mitigate, as well as frameworks to theorise, the effects of shifting ground in the Anthropocene.