Date and Place: 6.-7. June, 2019, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Organisers: Dr. Ingrid Boas and Dr. Hanne Wiegel, both Wageningen University

The relation between environmental change and human migration has often been discussed through two dominant discursive lenses: one conceptualising climate migrants as a danger to be prevented, and the other conceptualising it as an adaptation strategy through which migrants can (and should) enhance their resilience to environmental changes. Both perspectives have received critique: the former for raising unfounded alarmism based on questionable projections, and the latter for romanticizing the detrimental effects of climate change and placing the responsibility for adaptation with the individual migrant.

In this symposium, we want to explore an alternative lens and way forward by introducing the mobilities perspective to the field of climate change- and environmentally-induced human mobility, originating from the disciplines of sociology and human geography (see in particular the work of Sheller and Urry). As opposed to just assuming what migration is or what the implications of moving will be, it centers on understanding the movement itself: How do they move, where do they go, who stays behind, and how does this affect them? What role does the environment play in the different phases of migration trajectories? As such, it draws attention to the complexity of migration trajectories, the relationship between mobility and immobility as well as the role of unequal power relations as important issues for better conceptualizing the climate change-migration nexus. This contributes to a more grounded and dynamic understanding of the subject able to better capture its diverse character.

Adding to that, a mobilities lens enables an analysis of how human movements (e.g. migration or immobilities) intersect with other with mobile dynamics, such as information, social networks, transport systems, or with the dynamism of environmental events themselves. As such, adopting a mobilities lens can help to move the field of environmental migration beyond static perceptions of the phenomenon, centering on how human mobility or immobility is a product of an active intersection of social, informational and environmental processes.

Next to exploring a mobilities perspective together with scholars from the field of the environmental change-human mobility nexus, the symposium aims to connect with scholars working on other types of migration and on mobilities more generally.

Programme

Date and Place: 1.-2. June, 2017, Hamburg University

Organisers: Dr. Delf Rothe, IFSH, and Dr. Christiane Fröhlich (then CEN – UHH, now GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies)

Geologists and Earth System scientists have argued that the planet has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene names the age in which humanity took control over the planet and pushed the Earth System into a new stage of disequilibrium, with significant effects on global human – and non-human – mobility. The proposed workshop draws on this new perspective on planetary change provided by the Anthropocene debate to further the debate on environmental or climate-induced migration and its policy implications.

The Anthropocene’s implications for the study of environmental migration as well as for international security have so far seldom been considered in academic literature, even though it forces us to re-evaluate and re-think our fundamental ontological and epistemological concepts (Gemenne 2015). As argued by Bruno Latour and others, the advent of the Anthropocene implies the end of “’the bifurcation of nature’ or the final rejection of the separation between Nature and Humanity that has paralyzed science and politics since the dawn of modernism” (Latour 2015).

The described “bifurcation of nature” also characterizes the existing literature on environmentally or climate-induced migration. In the earlier literature on environmental migration, often accused of a naive environmental determinism, nature appeared in the form of disasters and extreme events, which tipped societies into chaos and pushed people out of their homes (Myers, 1991, 1998, 2005; Myers et al. 1995; Brown 2008; Waever, Buzan, Kelstrup, & Lemaitre, 1993). But even though the literature on environmental migration has become much more sophisticated and the environmental determinism of the old days has been replaced by sensitivity for the multi-causality of migratory decisions (Castles 2002, Morrissey 2009), the social and the natural are still artificially divided into a set of variables, just to be recombined and layered in computer models or regression analyses (Selby 2014).

The workshop seeks to fundamentally rethink the prevailing ontological categories of environmental migration research and to work towards an analytical framework which studies processes of human mobility within their specific, hybrid socio-natural contexts. It seeks to initiate a fruitful dialogue between scholars working on climate change and human mobility, on the one hand, and scholars engaging with the Anthropocene concept and its theoretical and normative implications on the other.

Anthropo_mobilities_Programme