Intersectional subjectivities and climate change adaptation: An attentive analytical approach for examining power, emancipatory processes, and transformation

Abstract

Human geographers and other critical scholars have long emphasised the disproportionate effects of climate change on individuals and populations already socially and economically marginalised. Yet, scholarship and practice continue to work with inadequate conceptualisations of how these inequalities are perpetuated. In this critical examination, we illustrate that the feminist literature on intersectional subjectivities provides pertinent insights into transformational, emancipatory futures for disenfranchised individuals and groups who bear the brunt of the climate crisis. By focusing on how power dynamics produce and sustain multidimensional inequalities, across cultural and geographic contexts, and linking this with understandings of subject making, we draw attention to the many ways pervasive inequalities are challenged and (re)negotiated in the everyday of human–environment relations. As part of this line of inquiry, we further demonstrate how a focus on intersectional subjectivities helps to expose and overcome lingering ethical dilemmas and injustices within transformation efforts, with emphasis on the roles researchers and practitioners can play in nourishing emancipatory spaces. Progress in this space is crucial to critically examine and establish more transformative adaptation trajectories that foreground dignified lives in an increasingly unequal world.

Geography and ethics I: Placing injustice in the Anthropocene

“…As such, intersectionality has been used to highlight the unethical spatial burdens of climate change on Black spaces in particular, as well as the complexities of climate change across registers of race, gender, class and coloniality (e.g. Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Vergés 2017; Hawthorne 2019; Garcia and Tschakert 2022).…”

Learning from wildfire: co-creating knowledge using an intersectional feminist standpoint methodology

“…While these are not new feminist theories, and they have informed a variety of important feminist analyses, intersectionality and standpoint feminism are less often applied explicitly as methodologies for empirical data collection, and as such, there is a need for practical methodological guidance for researchers using these approaches empirically (Walker et al, 2019). Intersectionality, in particular, has been promoted as a potentially helpful framework for climate change research (Djoudi et al, 2016;Garcia and Tschakert, 2022). This research sought to operationalize these theories to demonstrate their methodological value particularly when seeking to enhance community resilience.…”