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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers places as 'knots' - encounter of mobile agents - in the context of the migration of a caiçara community affected by climate change in Brazil. This paper discusses the relational re-ordering of agents in place-making due to growing precariousness in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on preliminary findings from my fieldwork with the Nova Enseada community in Brazil, this paper discusses how 'anticipated' climate change impacts shapes place-making in the Anthropocene. Nova Enseada is a caiçara community - artisanal fishers from the east coast of Brazil - which had to relocate due to coastal erosion and sea-level rise. A process of community-led relocation started in November 2016 after a cyclone hit the region; a further cyclone in 2017 contributed to the destruction of their home place by making the strip of land where the community lived for 170 years disappear. The community chose and legally fought for a new location within the same Island to rebuild their houses.

In this context of ongoing mobilities, "place" seems to fall under what Ingold (2011:151) described as constellations of encounter and experience. To better acknowledge human, non-human and inhuman interplay, this paper merges "place" through Clark's (2011) use of the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of different kinds of matter coming together in homogenous aggregates. This notion allows us to analyse the movements within and between aggregates that makes them open to re-ordering. Through 'anticipated' and experienced climate change impacts, the Anthropocene reveals the precariousness of being dependent on the relationships in these assemblages. This paper discusses how the process of place-making in the experience of Nova Ensenada reproduces past 'knots' between mobile agents (human and non-human) as far as possible. However, it also considers the ways that the 'anticipated' uncertainty of the future changes relations in these entanglements.