Geographies of endings (and beginnings). A spatial reading of climate futures
Topics: Cultural and Political Ecology
, Economic Geography
, Africa
Keywords: West Africa; climate change; future; space; anthropocene
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40
Authors:
Juliane Miriam Schumacher, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
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Abstract
Imaginations of the future have, over the last years, increasingly been shaped by the discourse on the Anthropocene and dystopic visions of the arrival or intensification of catastrophic and ruinous times. The future, in this way, is increasingly associated with different forms of endings, either forced by destruction and loss, or by calls to ‘build back’ in a conscious and voluntarily way, to dismantle or ‘depresence’ existing infrastructures, political and economic systems. While this debate has been taken up in geography, the specific spatialities of both endings and the debate on endings are rarely being discussed. Where is a need to ‘close’ articulated, which localities does it refer to, and which specific historic condition does is reflect? What about places where infrastructures and specific systems cannot be dismanteled because they were never erected? How to grasp the uneven spatial and temporal orientations of the need to build and to build back? Drawing on research and writing projects on climate futures in West Africa, Europe and the US, I am questioning the universality of both the expectation and the assumed need for endings, trying to ‘relocate’ the debate and offer a geographically more nuanced approach towards the arts of closure.
Geographies of endings (and beginnings). A spatial reading of climate futures
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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