Tracking local and regional climate im/mobilities through a multidimensional lens

Abstract

Recent scholarship on climate mobilities and mobility justice calls for dynamic, relational, and agent-centered approaches to comprehend the complex decision-making that compels certain people to leave the places they call home, encourages or forces others to stay put, and acknowledges those who engage with mobile populations in host countries. Yet, these efforts fall short of advancing a coherent conceptual framework to make sense of the multifaceted, subjective, and affective aspects of climate-related movements and deliver more inclusive research agendas in the context of regional environmental change. This article aims to address this gap by introducing a multidimensional visual heuristic that we call the im/mobility cube. This framework makes it possible to systematically examine relational and intersectional struggles of mobility and (dis)placement, along three interconnected axes: the lived experiences of moving, remaining in place, and receiving mobile subjects upon arrival; the role of climate change as part of a complex web of drivers; and the consequences that mobility and immobility have on people’s lives, livelihoods, and well-being, from desirable benefits to intolerable losses. This heuristic foregrounds the embodied inequalities and often intimate kinopolitical struggles that im/mobile populations face, at the juncture of their aspirations and capabilities, complex subject-making processes, and ever shifting relations of power. As such, our conceptual lens sharpens the focus on the simultaneity and linkages of climate-driven im/mobility encounters within regional contexts and their diverse and courageous protagonists.