Climate Urgency: Media, Expertise, Technology (URGENCY)

Anthropogenic climate change - as manifested in atmospheric CO2, extreme weather patterns and events (heatwaves, droughts, floods, fires), ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss - demands a dramatic reconfiguration of politics, infrastructures, technologies, and systems. This project responds to a growing urgency expressed by European research councils and funding agencies, as well as by governments, publics and students that the social sciences should contribute to our understanding and engagement on climate change. We propose that the need for urgent action demands that social science attends to “urgency” itself. “Urgency” is a cultural and relational imperative. With 10 ethnographic studies, we will inquire the connections between climate urgency and faith, the moral economy, ethics, ideas of the good, and social, political, and economic pressures.   Our research will help understand what the social conditions are for acceptance of climate change, and for people acting upon it, as well as for climate denial, and refusal, even resistance against state/institutional interventions.

Keywords:climate change, urgency, ethnography

Disciplines:Social and cultural anthropology