Project overview

Climate change is increasingly significant in our individual research around transnationalism, mobility and (forced) migration. Yet, current debates are dominated by natural science concepts such as ‘adaptation’, ‘resilience’ and ‘tipping points’. These go largely uncontested as they relate to people and communities whose actions and understandings are mediated through culture, modes of subsistence and emotions. As researchers exceptionally strong in ethnographic approaches and discourse analysis, our goal is to critically address these concepts from local community perspectives, including through a focus on women and older people, as communities suffer resource degradation due to climate change, and to poor biodiversity management and climate change mitigation by national governments. We aim to bring local understandings and responses to the attention of both Global South and North policy makers managing the impacts nationally around in and out migration, changes to the family unit, poverty, labour, and resource use; and internationally around the UN’s calls for global action through SDGs that promote well-being, poverty reduction, sustainable growth, and women’s empowerment. Our proposal brings two key novelties to these discussions: i) methodological; and ii) conceptual, in that we want to critically question the very concepts of ‘resilience’, ‘adaptation’, and ‘sustainability’.

Staff

Lead researchers

Dr Michael Kranert PhD (UCL), QTS, Staatsexamen, SFHEA

Associate Professor

Research interests

  • Discourse Analysis
  • Political Discourse
  • Comparative Political Discourse Analysis
Connect with Michael

Dr Julie Vullnetari

Associate Dean EDI
Connect with Julie

Dr Heidi Armbruster

Associate Professor

Research interests

  • The anthropology of migration and borders
  • Race and diversity in rural and provincial spaces;
  • critical whiteness;
Connect with Heidi

Dr Aude Campmas

Lecturer in French Studies

Research interests

  • Representations of childfree women
  • Trauma and discrimination
  • Trauma and memory
Connect with Aude

Dr Ka-Kin Cheuk

Lecturer in Anthropology

Research interests

  • Transnationalism
  • Migration
  • Inter-Asian connections
Connect with Ka-Kin

Professor Marion Demossier

Professor of French & European Studies

Research interests

  • climate ethnography and environment and climate change
  • French and European politics
  • Republicanism
Connect with Marion

Professor Laura Lewis

Professor of Anthropology

Research interests

  • History and ethnography of race and Afro-Mexico/Afro-Latin America
  • Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Mexico
Connect with Laura

Dr Bindi Shah PhD, FHEA

Associate Professor

Research interests

  • A key question that Bindi is interested in asking is: What shapes citizenship and a sense of belonging to the nation amongst immigrants and established ethnic minority communities?
  • Bindi is also interested in exploring the role of social capital for developing interdisciplinary solutions to climate crisis and biodiversity loss for marginalised communities.
Connect with Bindi

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs