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.
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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