Who is the subject in Himalayan Adaptation? Challenging crisis epistemologies and pluralizing the Anthropocene on the roof of the world

Keywords: Himalayas, climate change adaptation, novel masculinities, indigeneity, critical adaptation studies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17

Abstract

The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment report notes that “Climate Change adaptation policies and practices must intensify in the HKH and must become transformative” (Wester et al. 2019). But such ‘transformative’ thinking is absent in much of Himalayan climate knowledge production, which builds on environmental deterministic and technomanagerial renditions of exceptional precarity; advocates for an increase in the scientific and expert driven projects on the ground; and finally, remains rooted in the scalar realities of the nation-state. Our work further contributes to the rich scholarship that offer a counterweight to depoliticized renditions of adaptation through a wellspring of critical, feminist, and radical visions of human-nature scholarship from the region, highlighting the complicated negotiations between human and more-than-human entities, in a colonially quotidian, geo-politically ambivalent and ecologically subjugated landscape. We present ‘everyday stories of adaptation’ that have emerged from years of working alongside regional Himalayan communities and ask, who is the subject in Himalayan climate adaptation discourse and policies? And how can their stories help us envision an adaptation praxis which challenges regional narratives of crisis and provides alternatives to climate reductionist thinking/planning by foregrounding the intersectionality and plurality of communities and ecologies? Our stories highlight the daily labor for adaptation and reveal its mercurial relationship with the labor for survival.