As changing climates transform cities and regions, images of endless crisis erode any lingering semblance of stability, not only of our physical environment but of our capacity to make sense of what once appeared to be anomalous phenomena. Straining knowledge practices historically premised on the construction of stable, certain terms, confronting these upheavals requires new forms of understanding, invested in logics of transformation rather than fixity. Every response to climate change, accordingly, represents not only a strategy for addressing its urgent material consequences, but articulates broad epistemic transformations taking place within the disciplines and professions that produce the built environment. Whether in the ecological sciences, practices of design and construction, or the logics of infrastructure and planning, the material consequences of an extractive economy are accompanied by new demands for knowledge production rooted in global environmental concern. Making Climates aims to interrogate these encounters, asking how “climate” is itself reconstituted and how an aggregate of professionals, governing institutions, and public sensibilities is deployed in the work of making climate change real.
Organized by UCLA professors Christopher Kelty and Michael Osman with PhD student Shota Vashakmadze, this project intends to develop new areas of scholarship by building a network of researchers dealing broadly with shared issues of climate, cities, and technology. Drawing from diverse fields—including anthropology, STS, the history of science, and the history of architecture—it hopes to map out a common ground for studying the myriad forces shaping our new climates.
We are currently in the early stages of the project, building the network by holding a series of small, in-person conversations over the summer of 2021. Unable to safely host a conference and exhausted from a year of collaboration solely over zoom, we decided to travel from campus to campus in a “moveable feast,” paying visits to researchers across the University of California. Our first session was held on June 8th at UCLA and featured Jessica Cattelino, Liz Koslov, and Bharat Venkat, respectively discussing their work on sovereignty and water politics in the Everglades, a “retreat” from rising sea levels in New York, and an anthropology of extreme heat in the city.
A lively conversation over breakfast took us through and beyond a set of issues we’d put together as a preface (link to narrative) for the conversation. In talking through our work, we found continuities where our subjects came together in historical, cultural, and technical encounters, but which reframed deep questions when viewed across our projects overall. Chief among these was a shared problematization of geography against the forms of spatial organization put forth by changing environments. The city and metropolitan region, often invoked as stable entities when discussing the political formations most directly reacting to climate catastrophe, quickly became complex sites defined by uncertain relations between societies, polities, and landscapes. How these mapped onto built areas, jurisdictions, and watersheds diverged according to the experiences and compositions of inhabitants, presenting unique localized responses to the ostensibly unifying force of climate.
Reorienting questions of space and context, the role of experience in the production of climate knowledge formed another interface between our individual projects. Simultaneously integral to and effaced in the most visible representations of climate, the bodily experiences of comfort, vulnerability, and displacement provided a groundwork for rationalities of decision making, at the scale of the individual as well as their organization in collective response. Bharat characterized these technologies as a “disembodied” experience of heat that displaced its registration from the body to external, quantitative modes of sensing. Between experiences scaled to the body and its surroundings (both environmental and technical), the divergent understandings of what change implied required a deliberate effort of reconciliation. “Sharing truths,” to use Jessica’s phrase, entailed new methods of communicating and representing knowledge of the environment.
Our capacity to stake out positions as researchers was complicated in this regard, inflected by what were alternately termed an “epistemological vertigo” and an “epistemological vortex” of climate discourse. On one hand, it impressed an experience of vertiginous doubt, pushed and pulled by individually convincing, yet incommensurate, truths encountered in the many isolated sites of making climates. On the other hand, however, a coherent alternative entailed an equally uncomfortable certainty, a reductive space that understood climate as a progressive ground of unstated ethical consensus. In situating our own work relative to the ethics of mitigation, the question of how climate is constituted was transposed to a question of how climate politics were developed and construed, and what exactly the political ramifications of a given response to crisis might be. In reviewing hegemonic formations of sustainability, adaptation, and resilience, consonances to wider effects neoliberal governance—like the “managed decline” of state authority paralleled in Liz’s research—embedded approaches climate in their wider social context.
Looking forward to building upon the territories explored in our first conversation, three more meetings will be scheduled over the coming months. This newsletter will send out regular updates regarding our conversation series, and in between will forward introductions, comments, questions, references, and anything our group may want to share. This can be done by replying to makingclimates@substack.com or by leaving a comment on the browser page (which requires logging in, since the list and its contents are private). After our series concludes in the Fall, the newsletter will be the home base of our “network,” facilitating ongoing projects in whatever form they might take.