Contribution short abstract:

This paper problematizes the process of designing research and creating transdisciplinary knowledge about bio-social adaptive strategies to urban overheating. Building on an ongoing research project, it reflects on challenges and potentialities such an approach brings to climate change adaptation.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper stems from an ongoing research project “Embodying Climate Change. Transdisciplinary Research on Urban Overheating” (EmCliC), which studies the experiences of heat and bio-social adaptive strategies to heat in Warsaw and Madrid. The research team includes social anthropologists, statisticians, sociologists, physicists, and climate scientists. As the research is currently ongoing, the paper will mainly reflect on the process of designing a study about climate change adaptation that bridges the divide between natural and social sciences.

The paper will engage with a set of questions related to knowledge construction. How do we converge our own knowledges, connected to various disciplinary fields, and incorporate the knowledges and embodied experiences of vulnerable people, most affected by urban overheating? Can studying people’s adaptive capacities to urban heat become a form of empowerment for them? How to incorporate various scientific perspectives, as well as various actors’ voices, into the design of the study? What is bio-social adaptation from a transdisciplinary perspective? How to connect different scales of adaptation, from individual bodily reactions to political strategic decisions?

The paper will take a closer look at the conceptual work around ‘adaptation’ and methodological exchanges that have been a vital part of our project. It will reflect on the power dynamics and hierarchies of knowledge in climate change research. By examining the role of anthropology and anthropologists, the paper will analyse the opportunities and difficulties of a transdisciplinary approach to climate change adaptation.