Not Flying as Anticipatory Critique

Abstract

In this commentary I contribute to discussions about the possibilities for postcarbon conferencing by drawing on my own experience of deciding not to fly. In this piece I explain how my epistemological position of reflexive critique cultivated within my home discipline of anthropology became compromised in the face of an increasing awareness and understanding of climate change. Reflexivity here operated not as a liberatory form but as a mode of thinking that stifled and closed down possibilities for acting in a climatologically engaged way. I describe how I came to rethink my own academic practice through a shift from epistemological reflexivity to material reflexivity and how this opened up the possibility of not flying as a legitimate mode of academic critique. In conclusion I describe some of the conceptual and intellectual openings that such a practice of critique is capable of generating, with a view to expanding the terrain of the possible to include transgressions that might eventually need to become the norm in a climate-changing world.