Social Life of Climate Change

These research seminars are interdisciplinary discussions around contemporary debates in the humanistic social sciences of climate change and the environment. Events take multiple formats, including standard seminar format as well as more engaged discussions of relevant readings and works in progress.

The seminars are open to all. If you would like access to any of the upcoming seminars please email geog.comms@lse.ac.uk.

The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and Environment, the Department of Sociology and the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

It is organised by Dr Kasia Paprocki (k.paprocki@lse.ac.uk) and Dr Austin Zeiderman (a.zeiderman@lse.ac.uk) of the Department of Geography and Environment and Dr Rebecca Elliott (r.elliott1@lse.ac.uk) of the Department of Sociology.

Please contact Dr Kasia Paprocki with any questions. Updates can be found on Twitter.

Michaelmas Term 2022

Elizabeth Chatterjee, Assistant Professor of Environmental History, University of Chicago
24 October 2022, 4-5:15pm (zoom)
Late Acceleration: The Early 1970s Climate Shock and Carbon Autocracy in India

One year before the famous Arab oil embargo of 1973, the global South was struck by a very different kind of energy crisis. A series of interlocking climate shocks ravaged agricultural heartlands around the planet, precipitating famines and electricity shortages just as oil prices began to spike.

This early 1970s polycrisis briefly unlocked a radically new horizon of energetic possibilities that played out differently across the globe. Especially hard hit were poor oil-importing nations, still largely overlooked in the decade’s burgeoning historiography. In India, the largest of such nations, the combined climate-food-energy crisis brought a twinned set of fateful changes. By June 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had resorted to imposing a constitutional dictatorship – the Emergency – for the first and only time in independent India’s existence, one amongst a series of coups and authoritarian takeovers that swept the postcolonial South.

Less noticed was a second transformation with planetary ramifications. Rising popular expectations collided with the energy crisis to impel a state-led embrace of coal, despite elite reservations about the environmental damage that would follow. Analyzing these dynamics is crucial to understand India’s rapidly rising carbon emissions, and offers evidence on the complex and troubling societal consequences of climate shocks.

Alejandro Camargo, Assistant Professor, Universidad del Norte (Colombia)
7 November 2022, 4-5:15pm (zoom)
Sedimented stories: Fluvial forces and natural archives in an unstable world

Sediments are materials that tell stories about the past. For climatologists, paleoecologists and archaeologists, sediments are natural archives that preserve particles of organic and inorganic matter accumulated over time, whose study allows us to understand the climate, environmental transformations and human occupations of bygone eras. For historians and other social scientists, sediments are a metaphor for understanding the shaping and accumulation of human experience in historical time. But what kind of contemporary human experiences are woven around sediment not as a metaphor but as a material that circulates and accumulates in the landscape and quotidian spaces? What does sediment tell about the future of those subjects whose lives are deeply intertwined with the flux and accumulation of this element?

For many people who inhabit rivers, streams and swamps in the Colombian Caribbean, sediment is part of their daily lives and, therefore, it shapes their memories and visions of the future in the midst of disaster, conflict, and inequality. The sediments remind them of stories of the life and death of rivers and swamps, as well as the prosperity and decay of rural life. For these people, the force of rivers is the engine that animates sediment. Thus, fluctuations in fluvial forces can allow life, but they can also produce disasters and agrarian conflicts through the erosion and accretion of sediment. Although in the Anthropocene humans are seen as a dominant planetary geological force, for these Caribbean inhabitants fluvial forces are stronger, surpass human control, and bring about ruin, exhaustion and desolation to their lives.Despite spreading climate adaptation discourses and intervention promising disaster control and ecosystem recovery in this region, fluvial forces seem to unfold rapidly thereby creating uncertainty and risk in the face of climate change.

This presentation explores the social life of river forces and natural archives to understand how sediment can tell stories about people, and how people tell stories about sediment in an increasingly unstable world.

*CANCELLED* Nikhil Anand, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Durable Derangements: The Making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road

In this paper, I examine the making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road Project. How might we account for the production of a highway in a climate changed city, one that it is situated on made-up land that fills an increasingly restive, rising sea? Thinking with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016), I draw attention to the interests, aesthetics and technologies with which the road and is made durable. I argue that Mumbai Coastal Road is not made with “rational” plans, designs and studies of urban infrastructure.  It is mobilized by the aesthetics of modernity (Ghertner 2015) and particular “habits of thought” (Benedict 1934) that privilege, valorize and assume the possibility of bourgeois regularity in the city; a deeply felt orientation and mode of intervening in the world that continues to produce the climate crisis, both in Mumbai and beyond.