Climate Cultures

This chapter proposes a cultural geography of the climate change crisis in which the crisis is approached as a historically unique cultural formation. It examines, in particular, how this formation comes into existence in relation to its constitutive outside in the figure of the climate migrant/refugee. The cultural geography developed here entails putting the nebulous, undecidable conception of the figure of displacement at the methodological centre of analysis to better grasp, and challenge, the unconscious repetition of an enduring naturalism within the climate change imaginary which takes the ideological form of ‘climatism’ or ‘climate reductionism’. The chapter proposes this as a unique but urgent approach for understanding how the climate change imaginary is political, with what sorts of consequences and how to foster new forms of being in relation to the crisis.