Panel 1
Precarity in a Climate of Change
By Cleovi Mosuela
This paper analyzes the interplay of migration and climate change through the lens of migrant subjectivity when migrant workers seem to be disproportionately vulnerable, when they are pounded by the winds, the waters, earthquakes, and state carelessness. Based on initial field research in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and New York City and interviews with six grassroots migrant organizations, this paper provides insights into the nuanced post disaster experiences of migrants or non-citizens in the United States. I suggest that the lens of precarity brings to light how migrant workers mobilize from the position of bearing witness to the condition of being on the frontlines of climate change, and of the temporality of migrants’ status in the host country. This paper aims to contribute to the workshop by moving beyond a reductionist account of a climate change-migration nexus and towards an understanding of precarity experienced by migrants at the intersection of climate change and migration politics.
Climate Refugee Stories: Building an Archive of Resilience
By Tina Shull
In November of 2016, a man named Fortune called the non-profit organization Freedom for Immigrants’ national hotline from a Florida immigration detention center. He told the volunteer operator that he could not return to his country because Hurricane Matthew, a Category 5 hurricane that first made landfall in Haiti on October 4th, had destroyed his home. While the United States had granted Temporary Protected Status to migrants from Haiti in the wake of its 2010 earthquake and for a brief period after Hurricane Matthew, this status had since been lifted and Fortune was deported to Haiti. Advocates have since lost touch with him, but thanks to the efforts of Freedom for Immigrants to document people’s experiences in US immigration detention, Fortune’s story remains. But so do the questions: who do stories like Fortune’s belong to? How do we honor them? What is the cost of their being lost? This paper explores the intersections of the struggles for climate and social justice, and how the disciplines of History and Ethnic Studies can contribute to our understandings of climate change through a discussion of the Climate Refugee Stories digital humanities project. Climate Refugee Stories is a multimedia narrative, public education, and archiving project that uplifts the stories of people from around the world who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change and documents the ways communities are responding to these crises. As there are currently no legal protections for climate refugees in US or international law, the project places an emphasis on “borders,” broadly defined as sites where movement is controlled or restricted. The project is global in scope but focuses on the United States as current US policies of climate change denialism and refugee refusal are exacerbating a global refugee crisis. What’s more, the United States is, by far, the leading carbon emitter in world history. The project employs mixed methods of participatory action research, oral history, archiving, and co-curricular development to invite storytellers, students, and audiences to debate and define “climate refugees” for themselves in order to reveal the historical, political, economic, and environmental causes of global inequality and displacement, to recognize community resilience, and to provide tools for allying movements for social and environmental justice.
Panel 2
Flowing Grounds, and the Layers of Disaster Mobilities
By Felix Mauch
Rivers move. They run, roll and flow, no matter how hard we try to fix them in place. Constantly transgressing physical as well as political borders, rivers thereby also mobilize people, plants, animals, and fluvial materials. And yet, Wilhelmsburg, a little speck of land located between two branches of the northern German Elbe and gradually reshaped by its current, was never more in flux than over the long aftermath of Hamburg’s “Great Deluge” in 1962, when thousands of disaster displacees moved in and out of the flood area. The flood catastrophe was a pivotal and transformative event in the island’s history. Its “migrancy”, I however would like to argue, was already a fundamental component of its amphibious setting: not caused but only further enhanced by natural hazard. My paper seeks to interrogate how varying forms and time scales of environmental change – from daily tides to ‘once-in-a-century’ storm floods and thousand-year intervals in river avulsions – set Wilhelmsburg in motion. By focusing on movements of (more-than-)human migrations, wetland ecologies, social justice, and the politics of disaster relief that each in their own ways both forged and dismantled Wilhelmsburg’s “islandness” at the same time, I intend to contribute to a better understanding of disaster-induced mobility patterns in the longue durée. With this approach I also hope to press another themethat is mostly missing from the discussion. Using a longer chronology will allow me to explore how continuous natural action has posed a severe challenge for disaster migrants hoping to stand still. Or, in other words: being stuck on the island proved to be the actual catastrophic effect triggered by the floodplain’s constant movement. From that point of view, Wilhelmsburg’s environmental history is indeed a special case, for it inverts the common story of dynamic humanity disrupting a static nature.
Vanport, Oregon: Race, Displacement and the Reconstruction of a “Lost City”
By Uwe Lübken
The history of Vanport, Oregon, is in many ways unique. This city of approximately 40,000 inhabitants (some people question whether it was a city in the first place) was constructed in just a few months, it existed merely six years and, in the end, its citizens had about 35 minutes to pack their belongings and flee the impending flood of the Columbia River. Despite this extraordinarily brief period of existence, Vanport has a fascinating “afterlife.” In fact, one can argue that Vanport has, for a variety of reasons, literally been recently rediscovered. This paper looks at the origins of Vanport coming into existence and the factors that have shaped the diaspora of the displaced population and explores the memory of this “lost city.”
Panel 3
Environmentalism in the Global North – Environmental Destruction and Forced Migration in the Global South: The Question of Lithium
By Katharina Loeber
Many countries in the Global North rely on electromobility to counter climate change. The raw material required for electromobility technologies is lithium. Global lithium production has more than doubled since 2016. This increase raises the question of post-colonial economic and ecological interactions. The largest lithium deposits are located in the so-called “lithium triangle” between Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. The raw material is easily accessible since it is deposited in salt lakes. However, the mining of lithium destroys the livelihood of the local population. This result, in turn, leads to refugee movements on the one hand and labor migration on the other.
In my talk, I deal with the ecological effects of lithium mining and the resulting migration movements. First, I will outline the environmental impact of lithium mining in Latin America and Africa and electric mobility opportunities in the Global North. Post-colonial relationships between the industrialized nations in the North and former colonies will play an important role. In the next step, I will investigate the migration movements caused by lithium mining. On the one hand, parts of the population, such as Bolivia and Argentina’s indigenous population, are forced to flee because their economic and ecological livelihood is being destroyed. At the same time, people will migrate to the lithium regions to work there. This migration has various implications for human-environment relationships. In the final step, I will analyze the social and ecological consequences. On the one hand, there is the question of dealing with the emerging refugee movements, starting with recognizing ecological crises as a reason for fleeing. On the other hand, solutions such as sustainable mining processes, negotiations with the local population groups, or creating a lithium industry in resource-rich countries are conceivable.
Fifty Years Apart: Bengali Settlers and Bengali In-migrants in the Andaman Islands
By Ruhi Deol
Following Independence from the British colonial regime, and the Partition of India, the Andaman Islands — a Union Territory administered by the Central Government of India were settled through state-led ‘colonization and rehabilitation schemes’ between the 1950s and 1980s by Hindu refugees from East Bengal. Today these settlers are a major part of Andaman society, with increasing political and social mobility. And now, fifty years later, the Central Government is pushing to develop these Islands through tourism. The economic opportunities this entails have led to waves of in-migration from the Indian ‘mainland’. Employing the Andaman Islands as a case study, this paper proposes to explore ways in which migrants from areas affected by climate change may influence the socio-political dynamics of the places to which they migrate. It considers the case of in-migration to the Andamans, particularly the increasing rates of in-migrating labour from the district of South 24 Paraganas, in the state of West Bengal. This district, which includes the particularly vulnerable Sundarban delta, has been affected by sea-level rise as well as a higher intensity and frequency of cyclonic storms in the last two decades. In the Andaman Islands, in-migrants from West Bengal district are predominantly employed as construction and agricultural labour. Their increasing migration has been a point of contention for other ethnic and social groups, particularly the descendants of convict-settlers or Pre-independence settlers. Politically organised as the Local Born Association, they claim this migration has been tacitly encouraged by the Bengali settler community, is stealing scarce job opportunities from islanders, and pushing the Islands beyond their carrying capacity. I explore how Bengali settlers view these in-migrants, and how their presence affects aspects of Bengali islander society, especially in areas where tourism is flourishing.
Panel 4
Racial Geontopower: Towards a Political Geology of White Supremacy
By Andrew Baldwin
In this paper I sketch the contours of what I’m proposing to call racial geontopower – this is a form of racism that undertakes to control or modulate the movement of people in relation to geophysical heterogeneity, or more simply the undoing of the Earth. It’s the racism at stake in the political discourse on climate change and human displacement, migration and resettlement. This paper starts from the premise that the figure of the climate change migrant/refugee is racialised. However, it further develops this idea through an engagement with the ontological turn in black studies alongside recent work in the geological turn in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Racial geontopower is by necessity a reactive logic but one that masquerades in the language of progressive liberalism. Its mode of application is neither segregation nor integration but circulation and adaptation. But unlike biopower its terrain of application is not territory, but proto-territory. Ontopower is a form of power that operates in relation to ontogenic processes; racial geontopower operates in an ontogenic field prior to race itself. This paper will consider these ideas in relation to international discourses and aesthetics on climate change and human migration.
Adaptation, Relocation, Marginalization: Contradictions in the Governance of Environmental Mobility
By Achilles Kallergis
Climate-induced migration increasingly occupies a central place in migration, climate and urban policy discussions. The dominant and self-reinforcing policy narratives dramatically portray climate migration as a looming crisis that will test the adaptive capacity of countries, cities, citizens and the environment. Yet they provide little evidence on the mechanisms and impacts of climate mobility. Across fora, environmental migration is often reduced to a linear, unidirectional and monocausal migration pattern, a depiction that is far from the intertwined human mobility drivers documented by research. This paper suggests that a more dispassionate and fluid analytical and multi-scalar perspective that focuses on the interconnections between human mobilities and their impact on destination places, localities and populations could more meaningfully contribute to a better understanding of the impacts of climate mobility. This involves first and foremost the acquisition of better knowledge on climate mobility. The paper explores how multiple knowledge systems, can contextualize and provide a more granular view on climate mobility in the context of African cities and their informal neighborhoods. It uses community-conducted surveys to unpack the complex relationship between mobility and environmental conditions as they occur in destination places in low-income neighborhoods that absorb mobile populations.
Panel 5
Individual Initiative and Population Relocation Process in Late Soviet Union (1986 – 1991)
By Serhiy Choliy
This paper is devoted to an investigation of the population relocation processes after the Chernobyl disaster, processes that in many cases can be recognized as symptoms of democratization, the rise of public initiative and loss of governing authority by Soviet power. The Chernobyl disaster became a great challenge to the Soviet Union; it is even recognized by some scientists as a key point in its dissolution (Priester). The economic effect is estimated as higher than all profits combined from the nuclear power industry in the post-WWII Soviet Union. One of the integral components of managing this disaster was forced migration from contaminated territories. Such measures affected up to two hundred thousand people and stretched in time for decades in the aftermath of disaster. Investigating the processes of population relocation through official documentation as well as interviewing relocated people demonstrates two main stages of relocation: 1986-1987 and 1988-2004. In the first stage, the state controlled all processes of relocation, trying to make it as fast and effective as possible. At the second stage, relocation became a part of administrative routine and planned economy, often confronted by different difficulties. At the same time, organized and mostly forcible resettlement in the first stage changed to a situation where the population of contaminated areas could influence their fate, increase the speed of resettlement, and acquire better living conditions at the place of resettlement, etc. Such analysis is made through reference to two case studies of the Zhovtneve area (contaminated territory) and Novosilky (resettlement place), both in the Kyiv region of Ukraine.
The Perfect (Shit)Storm: ‘Green Fake News’ and Xenophobic Misogyny in Far-Right Populist Discourses on Climate Change and Displacement in the German ‘Climate Passport’ Debate
By Sarah Louise Nash
Since 2017, a debate has been ongoing in Germany concerning a proposal for a climate passport, which would essentially be a document provided to people in danger of becoming displaced due to climate change, then allowing them to emigrate to nation states that due to their historical and current emissions are most responsible for climate change. In 2019 the climate passport was debated in the German Bundestag in a motion moved by the Green Party. The proposers’ discourse drew on the concept of historical responsibility and critiques of failing climate policy. However, an extremely combative opposition discourse has also been present, put forward mainly by the populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. This discourse is marked by challenging the link between climate change and displacement, conflating the climate passport with a German passport, focusing on so-called illegal migration, emphasizing international development cooperation – particularly the trope of overpopulation – and an intertwining of xenophobia and misogyny. Not only the discourse but also practices surrounding opposition were marked by misogyny, with attacks reported against female politicians supporting the Green Party proposal. I argue that the debate surrounding the climate passport is emblematic of a blind spot in the literature on climate change and human mobilities, which has not focused on the workings of nation state legislatures. Through exploring these discourses we can begin to open up the black box of the often cited political unfeasibility of policy proposals.
Panel 6
Migration, Climate Change and Capitalism
By Thomas Nail
I call the “climate-migrant industrial complex” the group of private companies who profit by securitizing nation-states from the effects of climate-related events, including migration. This includes private detention centers, border construction companies, surveillance technology consultants and developers, deportation and transportation contractors, and a growing army of other subcontractors profiting from insecurity more broadly. Every feature of this crisis complex is an opportunity for profit. For example, even when security measures “fail” and migrants cross borders illegally, or remain beyond their visas to live without status as “criminals,” there is an entire wing of private companies paid to hunt them down, detain them, and deport them just across the border, where they can return and begin the market cycle all over again. Each step in the “crimmigration” process now has its own cottage industry and dedicated army of lobbyists to perpetuate the laws that support it.
This paper looks at the ways that climate change and migration are being used as weapons of primitive accumulation against the global poor. Climate migrants now form what we might call a “disposable climate labor army,” conscripted out of a standing reserve of global poverty from wherever the next climate-related disaster strikes, and deployed wherever capitalism demands precarious, securitized, and criminalized labor to be exploited.
Managing, Now Becoming Refugees: Climate Change and Extractivism in the Republic of Nauru
By Julia Morris
The Republic of Nauru, the world’s smallest island state, at just 21km2, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century as part of a colonial extractive arrangement. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted by the 1990s, the by then sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry, importing Australia’s maritime asylum seeker populations. Anyone who makes their way by boat and claims to be a refugee in Australian territorial now excised waters is offshored to Nauru or Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island for refugee processing and resettlement. Yet, while Nauruans are imbricated in managing refugees – with an extensive program of financialization and institutionalization in place – local islanders are also ironically now faced with becoming refugees. Projections of sea level rise indicate that Nauru is experiencing dramatic ecological upheavals. Ocean acidification is also affecting the island’s coral reefs, fisheries and marine resources.
This paper focuses on how Nauruans conceptualize climate change in a context where refugees are equated with financial profit, not with self-embodied realities. Anxieties about the inevitable decline of phosphate and refugees converge with a larger trend of the commodification of nature, whereby Nauruans are monetizing their own crises in the quest for ecological profit. I argue that the island’s overlapping post/colonial industrial histories have fomented a culture of extractivism, in which climate – much like minerals and migrants – has become the object of an accumulation strategy. Yet even as climate change has become a profitable line of business for networks of elites, this paper ultimately emphasizes the disproportionate consequences of climate change and resource extraction on publics in the Global South. Intersecting patterns of global inequality are resulting in Nauru becoming a site of possible displacement in the future, as much as a hub of refugee resettlement in the present.