Seline Westerhof, Jotte de Koning, Neele Schlette, and Catherine Vroon
Climate change does not unite us; rather, it exposes and amplifies the huge inequalities that exist between different populations and regions worldwide. This is why the issue of justice is becoming a growing part of the climate debate, referred to as climate justice. Climate justice literature not only focuses on global inequalities but also increasingly points to the intersecting and hyperlocal inequalities existing in, for instance, urban neighbourhoods. These injustices are often visible in people’s access to subsidies or in differences in experiences of heat stress, which is, for example, increased for people living in social housing.
Municipalities and local programs increasingly aim to mitigate these inequalities by informing people about what they can do to address the effects of climate change. Yet such individualistic approaches often ignore systemic injustices and therefore risk reinforcing existing inequalities. Moreover, climate change narrative is increasingly dominated by abstract policy language and technical approaches that make it difficult for people to connect their own stories to these politics. More importantly, these narratives hamper local governments in connecting with people living in the neighbourhoods they make policies about, listening to local stories, and understanding the multiplicity of experiences and intersecting inequalities people live through in everyday life.
In this paper, we focus on how the situated experiences of feeling, living, and doing climate change provide insight, and explore how seasons and weather can function as a framework through which people make sense of and articulate lived experiences of climate change, and connect everyday sensory and embodied realities to broader socio-political systems around climate change.
This, as we argue, is inherently necessary for designing systems transformation that recognises a multiplicity of practices, including already existing hyperlocal transformative practices that do not always explicitly appear to be about climate change as we commonly understand it. Hence, this study builds on several layers, combining a practical, place-based, and action-oriented approach with a critical and reflexive perspective. It works towards a multi-layered and situated understanding of complex systems that often appear abstract but are embedded within people’s own lives and experiences.
The paper is based on an action-research project in which we explored how we, as researchers, could engage in meaningful and reciprocal ways with local experiences of climate change through community-based and artistic methodologies, including participatory workshops, situated storytelling, and reflective mapping exercises. In doing so, the process also urged us to reflect on our roles as researchers: what do we take, and what do we give back? The approach was informed by the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of the research team: anthropology, sociology, ethnography, arts, and design.
The action-research process unfolded organically, focusing on building relationships with local networks while simultaneously documenting and reflecting on how those engagements developed over time. These reflective mappings made visible existing practices, relations, and lived experiences within the neighbourhood, and showed how the process itself became one of co-learning and situated knowledge production, ultimately contributing to possibilities for collective reflection and action.
Keywords: imaginaries, climate justice, situational, artistic methodologies, neighbourhood-based research.