Cox, S. orcid.org/0000-0001-7686-0865 (2024) Unbounding the future: new directions for climate‐changed geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 49 (4). e12720. ISSN 0020-2754
Abstract
This commentary reflects on the contributions that human geography has made to climate change research, as well as future directions for human geographic work on climate change. I suggest that one of the key achievements of the field is to render climate change a boundary object: an entity whose interpretive flexibility allows it to become a shared object of knowledge that, in principle, facilitates collaboration across disparate communities of practice. However, the ways in which that contribution has been made, and made possible, have effects that ripple elsewhere. While the subfield of political ecology and its historiographical methods have played vital roles in laying the intellectual foundations for human geographic work on climate change, and thus its ability to construct climate change as a boundary object in the first place, I suggest that they and other neo-Marxian approaches to the study of the (climate-changing) environment tend to diminish human geographic engagement with the future as an object of scholarly inquiry. To address that limitation and help push climate-changed geographies in novel directions, I suggest that climate-changed futures be engaged problematically. I then conclude with a discussion of key empirical domains—chiefly climate reparations and climate adaptation—where such problem-oriented work may be productively applied.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords: | climate adaptation; climate change; future geographies; reparations |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Geography and Planning |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 08 Oct 2024 14:59 |
Last Modified: | 25 Feb 2025 16:07 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/tran.12720 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:218004 |