From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: shifting the debate

Andrew Baldwin,Christiane Fröhlich,Delf Rothe

doi:10.1080/17450101.2019.1620510

Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1620510

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Abstract

‘The Anthropocene epoch,’ as Claire Colebrook describes it, ‘appears to mark as radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution effected for the nineteenth century’ (Colebrook 2017). Th...

Highlights

The recent outpouring of ontological speculation on the Anthropocene across the humanities and social sciences certainly testifies to such a radical shift
While the Anthropocene carries such far-reaching ontological consequences, those writing about it have had surprisingly little to say about the ontological primacy of mobility and movement, the ever-presence of movement in social life, and the insight that mobility is political and a fundamental mechanism of social stratification
Our rudimentary keyword search does, suggest, at least to us, as newcomers to the field, that the material transmutations implied by global environmental crises, like climate change, the Anthropocene, increasing rates of extinction (Kolbert 2014)—the inescapable reality that climate change stands to effect new patterns of migration and mobility globally—remain peripheral to the ontological primacy of movement that distinguishes the mobilities paradigm from other styles of thought

Summary

Introduction

One of the aims of this special issue of Mobilities on ‘Anthropocene Mobilities’ is to add to this speculative moment by positioning ‘mobility’ as a key term of reference for thinking with, through and against, the Anthropocene as either a philosophical problem, a political concept, a material condition, or an epoch of deep time. A second, but no less significant, motivation for this special issue on the “Anthropocene Mobilities” is to position the Anthropocene as a key philosophical problem, political category, material condition, and epoch with which to contemplate and understand the social lives revealed to us through the framework of mobility.

Results

Conclusion