Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the precarious placemaking of the climate migrants in the Anthropocene in the context of South Asia. As the concept of the Anthropocene indicates the geological scale of human impact, this paper seeks to understand precarious dimensions of Anthropogenic placemaking.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the precarious placemaking of the climate migrants in the Anthropocene in the context of South Asia. As the concept of the Anthropocene indicates the geological scale of human impact, this paper seeks to understand precarious dimensions of Anthropogenic placemaking through dynamic understandings of human-nonhuman relations. By addressing Anthropocene mobilities in the context of South Asia, this paper aims to theorize on the precariousness of place in times of climate change. Drawing on preliminary findings from my fieldwork with a Dalit fishing community in coastal Bangladesh, this paper discusses how ‘anticipated’ climate change impacts shape placemaking in the Anthropocene. In this context of climate mobilities, “place” falls under what Tim Ingold (2011:151) described as constellations of encounter and experience. Through various climate change impacts, the Anthropocene reveals the precariousness of being dependent on these assemblages. This paper discusses how the process of placemaking in the experience of the Dalit fishing community in coastal Bangladesh 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. Despite the uncertainty and precarious conditions of their existence, refugees reorient themselves towards particular kinds of futures (Feldman 2015). This paper argues that the optimism of the climate migrants for the possible resettlement can be defined as “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) characterized by an attachment to a nearly unattainable object that becomes a goal that life is organized toward.