Area, 2016, 48.1, 2–6, doi: 10.1111/area.

12220

Researching the hybrid geographies of climate

change: reflections from the field
Jeff Popke
Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858-4353, USA
Email: popkee@ecu.edu

Revised manuscript received 27 July 2015

This special section grew out of a series of sessions on ‘Mixed methods and hybrid epistemologies’ at the
Association of American Geographers annual meetings in 2013 and 2014. The five papers that comprise
it each examine climate change as a mixed or hybrid entity, and consider some of the theoretical and
methodological tensions associated with contemporary climate change research. In so doing, the authors
reflect on the challenges of field-based observation and measurement, and they draw on a rich array of
conceptual resources in attempting to capture climate’s multidimensional character. In this brief intro-
duction, I consider the contributions of the papers in the context of three areas of climate change
scholarship: climate knowledge, ontologies of climate and the methodologies of climate change
research. Taken as a whole, the collection suggests the value of a methodological and epistemological
pluralism, one capable of registering the hybrid character of climate change and coping with the fact that
multiple measurements, understandings and enactments of climate may be equally valid.

Key words: climate change, epistemology, methodology, hybridity

ships’ and various kinds of ‘human actions’ within which

Introduction
In 1980, Mather et al. noted that a recent ‘succession of
climatic vicissitudes’ had heightened global awareness of
the social and economic repercussions of a changing and
variable climate. In response, they called for a renewed
emphasis on ‘topoclimatology’, which Mather and col-
leagues defined as the study of ‘the synergistic relation-
ships among climate processes, surface features, and
human actions’ (1980, 285). To carry out such a task, they
believed, ‘human-cultural geographers must join with the
climatologists in interdisciplinary work to help clarify the
significant economic, social, and political impacts of
climate’ (1980, 291).
Over the ensuing quarter-century, it is safe to say that
climate’s ‘vicissitudes’ have become even more pro-
nounced, with the concomitant need for interdisciplinary
efforts to make sense of the resulting impacts much more
evident. Researchers taking up this challenge today,
however, face a conceptual landscape that has been trans-
formed by new understandings, not only of the ‘climate
processes’ referenced by Mather et al. (1980), but also,
and more importantly, the multiple ‘synergistic relation-
they are entangled. Climate is increasingly seen as a
hybrid entity, one characterized by environmental and
biophysical materialities on the one hand and sociocul-
tural knowledge, affect and practice on the other. Climate
change is now understood as a ‘cosmopolitan’ experience
(Hulme 2010), one that assembles together human and
nonhuman entities (Cupples 2012), diverse ways of
knowing (Murphy 2011), variable spatialities (Blok 2010)
and multiple temporalities (Head et al. 2011). If this is the
case, it also suggests a need to develop novel forms of
inquiry, and to deploy new methodological approaches,
capable of accounting for the hybrid character of environ-
mental change.
The five papers in this special section all contribute to
such a project. They all grapple in different ways with
the theoretical and methodological challenges associ-
ated with climate change research today. They do so
from perspectives deeply informed by immersion in
diverse empirical research settings, ranging from East
and West Africa to Nepal, China and Tibet. In attempting
to make sense of environmental change in these locales,
the authors reflect on the challenges of field-based

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not
necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
© 2015 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
 Researching the hybrid geographies of climate change
observation and measurement, and they draw on a rich
array of conceptual resources in attempting to capture
climate’s hybrid character. In so doing, the authors do
not seek to banish the methodological indeterminacy
and empirical complexities associated with climate
knowledge and experience, but, on the contrary, to envi-
sion new kinds of theory capable of holding different
ways of knowing in tension. Taken as a whole, the col-
lection offers resources for thinking through climate’s
hybrid character across three broad areas: climate
knowledge, ontologies of climate and the methodologies
of climate change research.
For a hybrid epistemology: expanding
climate perception and experience
It is now commonplace to assert that there are varied
understandings, multiple meanings and locally embed-
ded cultures associated with climate (Offen 2014). Not
least of these cultures is the particular invocation of
climate as an object of scientific knowledge, and one of
the major themes of recent climate change discussions
has been a call to open climate science to greater criti-
cal scrutiny as one specific kind of ‘framing’ or episte-
mology (O’Neill et al. 2010; Tadaki et al. 2014; Bee
et al. 2015).
Recent research has begun to counterbalance the
‘epistemic power’ (Mahony and Hulme 2012, 208) of the
scientific view, by bringing greater attention to the social
and cultural dimensions of climate change discourse and
policy, and opening the question of who and what counts
when it comes to climate knowledge (O’Brien 2010;
McCarthy et al. 2014; Offen 2014). Thus, there have been
a host of calls to place greater attention on local, lay or
vernacular understandings of climate (Brace and
Geoghegan 2010; Head and Gibson 2012; Gaillard and
Mercer 2013; Rice et al. 2015). The key research chal-
lenge in this shift is well-expressed by Jasanoff when she
asks
how, at the levels of community, polity, space and time,
will scientists’ impersonal knowledge of the climate be
synchronized with the mundane rhythms of lived lives and
the specificities of human experience? (2010, 238)
The resources for addressing this kind of question are
being developed by researchers focused on pluralising
our epistemologies of climate. One means of doing so is
to develop a greater appreciation for the embodied,
affective and emotional dimensions of the experience
of climate change (Head et al. 2011; Roelvink and
Zolkos 2011; Singh 2013). The overall challenge is to
effectively account for, and in so doing to valorize and
legitimate, the diverse range of climate knowledges,
practices and experiences, and to recognise that what
3
climate change means emerges through the embodied,
practical engagements that people have with their envi-
ronments (Johnson 2014; Watson and Huntington 2014;
Bawaka Country et al. 2015; Burnham et al. 2016; Yeh
2016).
It is a challenge taken up in some way by each of the
authors in this special section, but perhaps most explicitly
by Carr and Owusu-Daaku (2016), who demonstrate in
their research in rural Mali that climate knowledge is
shaped by the specific practices and experiences associ-
ated with different livelihood strategies. Focusing on the
dissemination of climate forecasts to local villagers, they
highlight the ways in which the culturally embedded per-
formance of gender and seniority lead to differentiated
subject positions among the consumers of climate knowl-
edge. To better account for the diversity of local livelihood
practices in Mali, they develop ‘an intersectional episte-
mology of identity’ (2016, 9), one that can be more sen-
sitive to the variable lived realities that undergird climate
knowledge and experience. This, then, is the first contri-
bution that emerges from the papers that follow, to show
how climate change knowledge and experience are situ-
ated and grounded in practice.
Toward a hybrid ontology: rethinking the
materiality of climate
The effort to diversify understandings of climate change is
not solely focused on questions of epistemology. A sig-
nificant vein of work focuses not so much on different
ways of knowing as on climate’s hybrid ontological and
material configurations. The post-human turn in geogra-
phy is diverse in its lineage and applications, but entails a
recognition that there are ‘complex networks of relations,
commonalities, interdependencies and communications
between the human and the other-than-human’ (Roelvink
and Zolkos 2011, 47). As applied to questions of climate,
a post-human sensibility can help to frame questions
regarding the materialities, technologies, forces and
assemblages that shape local manifestations of and
responses to environmental change.
Much of the existing work in this area has drawn on
various strains of assemblage thinking or actor network
theory, in order to highlight the ways in which environ-
mental change is made manifest through ‘hybrid articula-
tions of human and nonhuman material’ (Coward 2012,
467). To account for the realities of climate change, in
other words, we need to not only tap into human percep-
tion, but also consider the ways in which human–
environment relations are shaped by techno-natural
assemblages that yoke together bodies, materials, infra-
structures, technologies and ecosystems into meaningful
yet precarious assemblages (Birkenholtz 2011; Lorimer
2012; Gibbs 2013; Lavau 2013).
Area 2016 48.1, 2–6 doi: 10.1111/area.12220
© 2015 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
4 Researching the hybrid geographies of climate change
In their paper for the present collection, Burnham et al.
deploy this kind of understanding to theorise ‘the conduits
through which perceptions and experiences of climate
change come into being’ (2016, 19) in central China. Their
investigation leads them to consider the ways in which
aspects of dwelling – including interactions with crops
and weather, daily practices such as eating, and various
material objects – combine to shape the local experience
of climate change in ways that are not easily captured by
scientific methodologies. By placing theoretical and
methodological focus on the everyday materiality of
climate change, the authors are able to highlight the ways
in which ‘smallholder perceptions of climate change are
constituted through (shifting) associations of agricultural
and other forms of daily practice within socio-natural
assemblages’ (2015, 4, 21).
One of the noteworthy aspects of this kind of assem-
blage approach to climate change is that it shifts the frame
from considerations of epistemology to questions that are
ontological in nature. Sultana notes that ‘technonatural
assemblages come into being at specific sites and times’
(2013, 343) and this ‘coming into being’ can be seen as an
ontological event, the ‘enactment’ of a particular reality of
climate change. Taking seriously this ontological enact-
ment from a research perspective means, as Lavau puts it,
‘attending to the different realities that are produced in
particular sociomaterial orderings’ (2013, 424); to
acknowledge, with Livingstone, that ‘climate inhabits dif-
ferent worlds’ (2012, 93).
This is a key point made by Goldman et al. (2016) in
their contribution to the special section. Focusing on the
occurrence of drought in East Africa, they undertake a
material-semiotic and topological analysis of the various
ways that drought is enacted in practice by different sets
of actors, including Maasai herders, non-governmental
agencies, policymakers and climate scientists. Different
understandings of drought, they argue, do not merely
represent different perspectives on the same event;
rather, ‘there are in fact multiple droughts enacted
simultaneously, in ways that both reinforce and contra-
dict each other within and across communities and
topologies’ (2015, 6). This kind of approach opens up
the possibility of considering the ‘ontological politics’ of
climate change (De La Cadena 2010; Blaser 2014; Yeh
2016) as different enactments of what climate ‘is’ are
negotiated. As the authors conclude, ‘conflicts over
knowledge about climate are usually about a lot
more, about ontological differences’ (Goldman et al.
2016, 32).
Here, then, is a second key insight emerging from the
special section: understanding the ways in which climate
change might unfold in any particular locale is more than
just a matter of local knowledge or perspectives; it also
may mean taking account of the networks and assem-
Area 2016 48.1, 2–6 doi: 10.1111/area.12220
© 2015 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
blages through and along which climate is made manifest
and the ontological politics at stake in the making of
different ‘climate worlds’.
Methodological hybridity: mixed methods
and plural epistemologies in climate
change research
In an agenda-setting essay on geography’s role in thinking
through climate change, Mike Hulme noted that ‘the
subject to be studied – climate – needs to be re-framed
through negotiating a different ontological and epistemo-
logical structuring of climate knowledge’ (2008, 7). As the
work discussed above makes clear, this negotiation is well
underway, and there now appears to be an emerging
consensus that research into climate change will need to
adopt new theoretical approaches capable of better cap-
turing climate’s ontological and epistemological diversity.
Less remarked upon is what this means for research
methodology and the practice of fieldwork. Geography
has long maintained an identity as an interdisciplinary
field with a particular strength in combining the insights
of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. For
many climate change researchers, this means approach-
ing the field with a mixed repertoire of methods, with
projects often supplementing climate data derived from
scientific instruments or models with more ethnographic
or interpretive understandings (Crate 2011; Head et al.
2011; Geoghegan and Leyshon 2012). Murphy, for
example, calls for ‘an inter-epistemological dialogue
within the climate change research agenda’ (2011, 505),
one that takes ‘epistemic power dynamics’ seriously and
aims to foster intersubjective understanding (2011, 501).
Head and Gibson suggest moving away from overly sim-
plistic forms of explanation and ‘towards a more uncer-
tain, but lively sense of encounter between humans,
things, plants, animals, technology’ (2012, 705). For
climate change researchers, moving in this direction will
require a careful consideration of the politics of knowl-
edge embedded within our methods, research designs
and fieldwork practices.
This task is taken up most forthrightly in the contribu-
tions to the special section by Yeh (2016) and Nightingale
(2016), each of whom offers insight into some of the
methodological and epistemological challenges associ-
ated with field-based climate research. Yeh considers
some of the pressures and contradictions she experienced
as a member of a multidisciplinary research team
involved in a mixed-methods research project in Tibet.
She highlights in particular the challenges of negotiating
the differing, and at times conflicting, expectations of
what counts as ‘climate knowledge’ among funding agen-
cies, research colleagues, manuscript reviewers and the
Tibetan herders themselves. Nightingale (2016), reflecting
 Researching the hybrid geographies of climate change
on her work on climate adaptation in Nepal, likewise
considers the ways in which different assumptions about
knowledge shape what we see. She considers in particular
how ‘different analytical starting points can profoundly
reshape an entire research design’ (2016, 42), leading to
the question of ‘how to combine methods that view the
world differently’ (2016, 44).
In their discussion of these issues, Yeh and Nightingale
share an important conclusion, one that in fact cuts across
all of the papers in the special section: because all knowl-
edge is partial and situated, the goal (methodologically,
theoretically) should not be to develop a single complete
picture or seek resolution of climate’s hybrid and contra-
dictory character, but rather ‘to keep different epistemolo-
gies in productive tension with each other’(Yeh 2016,39).
‘Different forms of reasoning’, Yeh notes, ‘call for different
forms of representation and ponder different kinds of
questions’ (2016, 37). This also means, then, that ‘different
starting points bring into view alternative dimensions of a
research problem’ (Nightingale 2016, 46) and that ‘the
silences and gaps between the data from each part of the
larger project become interesting objects of analysis in
themselves’ (Nightingale 2016, 45; also Burnham et al.
2016). Here, then, is the third key insight from the papers
assembled here, that climate change research should
embrace methodological diversity and epistemological
and ontological incommensurability.
In sum, taken together, the papers that follow suggest
the value of a methodological and epistemological plu-
ralism, one capable of registering the hybrid character of
climate change and coping with the fact that multiple
measurements, understandings and enactments of climate
may be equally valid. They open up a dialogue that should
be of considerable interest to researchers interested in
developing a more nuanced and multidimensional char-
acterization of climate change and its far-ranging but
locally variant impacts.
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