Climate Change, Migration, Race: Dr Andrew Baldwin

Climate change is often said to be a pending form of injustice because it stands to force millions of people from their homes. This idea is now so widely accepted, we hardly ever stop to think about what it means or how it might be challenged.

In this short lecture, I develop an argument that challenges the taken-for-granted assumption that climate change is a problem of migration. Building on the ideas of Edward Said and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the argument is that the figure of the climate migrant/refugee stands today as a unique form of racial other—the other of climate change—that western humanism has had to invent in order to adapt to climate change.

The lecture provides some theoretical background to the argument, it identifies some of the racial tropes that construct the figure of the climate migrant/refugee as other than human, and it demonstrates how the political discourse on climate change and migration can be understood as a form of racial rule called ‘racial futurism’.

This session is part of our series on The Environment and Climate Change: https://www.connectedsociologies.org/...


Questions for Discussion
1. Are the categories ‘climate migrant’ and ‘climate refugee’ useful descriptors?
2. What sorts of actors (I.e., institutions, people, non-governmental organisations) claim that climate change is a problem of migration? Why do you suppose they do so?
3. If climate change is said to be a driver of migration, how should we account for the history of the places migrants are leaving?
4. What might it mean to say that ‘whiteness’ is adapting to climate change?