MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | CORPOREAL TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES

Figuring the Climate Refugee: Precarity, Adaptation, and Risk in Representations of Environmental Migration

OCTOBER 1 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

Over the past decade, media, international institutions, and individual states have warned that sea level rise, weather disasters, and extreme heat are effecting the mass displacement of climate refugees, particularly across South and West Asia. Focusing on images and descriptions of Syrian and Bangladeshi migrants as climate refugees, security risks, and resources for adaptation to climate change, this presentation argues that the emphasis on climate-driven displacement reflects the demise of emissions control regimes and a fusion of environmentalism with fully marketized and securitized forms of risk thinking. In the process, emerging visions of environmental migration rely heavily on grids of race, class, nation, and disability in order to speculate on how climate change entangles human and environmental systems.