Climate migration myths Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on 'climate mobilities' that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

This paper extends existing debate about the relationship between climate change and migration by locating this debate within the registers of race and difference. The paper argues that the discourse on climate change and migration generates a particular racial orientation to climate change called ‘white affect’. To make this argument, the paper connects up two related phenomena: racial neoliberalism and the relationship between affect and biopower. The white affect of climate change and migration discourse is here understood to be an ‘object‐target’ of biopolitics. White affect thus becomes an important concept for understanding how racial neoliberalism functions through affective proxy.

This paper analyses the growing discourse on climate change and migration from the perspective of critical race theory. The main contention put forward is that the figure of the climate change migrant is racialised to the extent that it is made to bear racial connotations. The paper traces the racialisation of the figure of the climate-change migrant through three specific racial tropes evident in the discourse on climate-change and migration: naturalisation; the loss of political status; and ambiguity. The paper concludes with the observation that the racialisation of climate-change and migration discourse does not point to any sort of universal theory of racialisation pertinent to the discourse but, instead, reaffirms the notion that racialisation is a contingent phenomenon. The paper also calls for an interpretation of climate change that is sensitive to racialisation as a key social process in the configuration of climate-change and migration discourse.

The Anthropocene epoch,' as Claire Colebrook describes it, 'appears to mark as radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution effected for the nineteenth century' (Colebrook 2017). The recent outpouring of ontological speculation on the Anthropocene across the humanities and social sciences certainly testifies to such a radical shift. Dipesh Chakrabarty's insights about the Anthropocene are emblematic (Chakrabarty 2009). The Anthropocene, he argues, marks not only the moment in which the human, Anthropos, becomes fully expressed in the Earth System, but also, paradoxically, the moment in which we lose our ability to grasp what it means to be human. Such a perspective captures well a sense in which the Anthropocene marks our passage into a geohistorical interregnum. As we depart from the geologic stability of the Holocene, so we leave behind the conceptual certainties of modernism, not least the fraught separation of Nature and Culture that has underpinned Euro-Western humanism from at least the fifteenth century onwards. Entering now an epoch in which the entanglements of social and geologic life are more and more ratified by the geosciences, it is no wonder that the social sciences and humanities have responded to the Anthropocene thesis by turning to ontological speculation. The Anthropocene is a scary business. Yet while the Anthropocene carries such far-reaching ontological consequences, those writing about it have had surprisingly little to say about the ontological primacy of mobility and movement, the ever-presence of movement in social life, and the insight that mobility is political and thus a fundamental mechanism of social stratification (although notable exceptions include Clark and Yusoff 2017; Colebrook 2017). This is unexpected given that the Anthropocene concept, by re-embedding human ontological awareness in deep time, draws us into ever closer proximity to Earth's geomorphology, its dynamism, its fluidity, the inherent mobility of the Earth system, or what Bronislaw Szerszynski calls 'planetary mobility' (Szerszynski 2016). One of the aims of this special issue of Mobilities on 'Anthropocene Mobilities' is to add to this speculative moment by positioning 'mobility' as a key term of reference for thinking with, through and against, the Anthropocene as either a philosophical problem, a political concept, a material condition, or an epoch of deep time. But if 'mobility' has been a somewhat muted category within discussions of the Anthropocene, so also it would seem the Anthropocene has been held to the peripheries of the mobility paradigm. A cursory keyword search of Mobilities, for example, suggests that concepts of 'Anthropocene', 'climate change' (i.e. impacts) and the 'environment' (i.e., the milieu of bio-and geophysical relations) have all played a relatively minor role in the mobilities paradigm since the inaugural issue of Mobilities in 2006 (notable exceptions include Szerszynski 2016; Adey and Anderson 2011; Blitz 2011). In pointing this out, however, we are not suggesting th...

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conservation comes to be associated with ‘white’ identity, although by no means exclusively so, and certainly not without significant contradictions. The essay deploys Robyn Wiegman's notion of liberal whiteness to argue that liberal white subjectivity is cultivated in these texts by its self‐conscious distancing, or disaffiliation, from colonial spatial practices. It is argued that this distancing is achieved through the active inclusion of First Nations peoples in the texts such that the boreal forest is constructed as a socio‐natural working landscape. Liberal white disaffiliation is explored through three specific tropes: inclusion, inverted racial historicism and economic partnership.

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Climate change is more and more said to be a problem of migration. The common refrain is that climate change will bear in some way on patterns of human mobility, resulting in either insecurity, humanitarian crises, or all manner of inventive adaptive responses. The inherent challenge in such claims is, however, that of causality: the degree to which climate change influences migration alongside the myriad social, political, and economic reasons people migrate. This challenge is far from being settled. Importantly, the unsettled question of causality exposes how the crisis of humanism is central to the construction of the climate migrant or climate refugee. Coming to terms with this crisis means having to confront how issues of power and knowledge shape how we understand the relationship between climate change and migration. But even more importantly it means having to ask probing questions about what it means to be human today. The study develops these arguments through an engagement with the concept of the monster and with Timothy Morton's concept of the hyperobject. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e460. doi: 10.1002/wcc.460 This article is categorized under: Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

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