Onward Journeys: Exploring Gendered and Household Climate Mobilities

Keywords: climate migration; climate mobilities; gender; households
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 24

Abstract

Using life-course histories with thirty-two climate migrants, this article explores gendered and household climate mobilities from drought-affected villages to the megacity of New Delhi, India. Male migrants were the first to move out from drought-impacted villages for employment in cities. The nature of their work in New Delhi varied from salaried jobs in the service industry to informal daily-wage work as labourers in the construction sector. Once men established a foothold in and stabilized their migration pathway, their female spouses joined them in cities. Women’s care work for children and family members help re-create domestic life in each new city. In the context of climate mobilities research, the article’s analysis of gendered climate migration opens up “the household” as an analytical category for future climate mobilities scholarship. Additionally, the article shows households are more than a homogenous category—members of households move over their life course. Climate migrants and their children make journeys between their home village and the city over time. As such, migrants maintain ongoing and enduring connections that spatially and relationally bind together their families in villages and their lives as migrants in the city. The article develops a heuristic scheme for classifying household climate mobilities based on three dimensions: a male spouse’s employment and number of moves; time-lag between spouses’ moves and the female spouse’s role within household division of labour; and the spatial location of other family members, such as children.