Infrastructural Fear: or When Climate Change Isn’t an Allegory

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• Stephen Lezak, PhD candidate, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Gates scholar
• Thursday 22 February 2024, 14:00-15:00
• Hybrid: Seminar room, SPRI & Zoom - email organiser for details.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Emilie Canova.

Social scientists readily look for the ways in which climate change serves as an allegory or a prism through which people understand contemporary and future politics of life on Earth. In two imminently-threatened Indigenous communities in Western Alaska, climate change rarely receives such treatment. Fear of climate change is infrastructural, not existential. These rural and Indigenous vantages onto the Anthropocene challenge the tendency to extract meaning from environmental change. At the same time, they contrast with other Indigenous viewpoints, such as those that attribute climatic change to sociocultural change. In this talk, I explore what it looks like when climate change is not about anything other than itself, and the ensuing politics of pragmatism that characterise two Indigenous communities’ subsequent responses.

This talk is part of the Scott Polar Research Institute - Polar Humanities and Social Sciences ECR Workshop series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Department of Geography
• Hybrid: Seminar room, SPRI & Zoom - email organiser for details
• Scott Polar Research Institute - Polar Humanities and Social Sciences ECR Workshop

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