Moving to Stay Still: The Child, Mobility, and Environmental Change

In recent years, concerns about displacement caused by environmental damage have become widespread in discourses around the environment (McLeman and Gemenne 2020). Yet, a recent turn within migration studies (Baldwin and Bettini 2017; Boas et al. 2022) warns of the potential dangers of framing migration as an outcome of environmental change, inasmuch as it ignores the multiplicity of possible mobilities (beyond uni-directional, cross-bordering migration), it obscures their embeddedness in pre-existing power structures (i.e., colonial legacies), and it presents migrants as passive victims. Following this critical strand, this paper explores films’ ability to offer alternative constructions of the relationship between mobility and environmental degradation that incorporate the multi-faceted, relational nature of (im)mobilities. It focuses on the potential of child figures, as they roam around freely, to subvert normative understandings of rootedness as passive stasis and of migration as an active adaptation to environmental change. Looking at films that depict children uprooted by environmentally-related phenomena—flooding in Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin 2012), rural gentrification in The Wonders (Rohrwacher 2014), and unsustainable waste disposal in Costa Brava, Lebanon (Akl 2021), for example—this paper argues that the cinematic child is used to explore micro-mobilities as a dynamic strategy to remain in place. Rather than moving away as a form of survival, children operate a process of “re-emplacement”, by which they “become mobile in order to counter anticipated displacement” (Farbotko 2022). In the process, the cinematic child emerges as a site for negotiating the role of mobility in a more sustainable future.