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DWELLING IN THE AGE OF
CLIMATE CHANGE
For all sentient beings
Elaine Kelly
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We
publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high
editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance.
For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
The right of Elaine Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Exceeding calculation: the ethics of adaptation
Dwelling, hospitality and the Other: foreign questions?
Mess: cultural theory and its ‘place’
How to read this book
Part A
1 The Adaptation Agenda
Local Adaptation
The climate–development agenda
Adaptation: a politics of place
The ethical primacy of the local
Conclusion: on shaky grounds
Part B
4 In and Out of Place: The Case of Bangladesh
Welcome
Local adaptation: situating climate change
A politics of place: land as lifeline
The limits of the local
Does this require global responsibility? Migration as adaptation
In practice: Australia–Bangladesh and the possibility of welcome
Conclusion: common grounds
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of
present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of
equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated
responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the
developed country Parties should take the lead in combating
climate change and the adverse effects thereof. (UNFCCC
1992)3
Certainly, I have given every effort over to being as clear and cogent
as possible with the arguments that populate this book. However,
Law’s articulation of gathering as analyses that defy a singular
location of coherence is pertinent to my undertaking. A neat
definition of dwelling will not emerge from this book. What dwelling
‘looks like’ in various cultural contexts is not the purpose of my
discussion.7 Dwelling, as I understand it, will take on something of a
deconstructive dance (explored in Chapter 2). This dance will not
reveal to us an end point or set of answers to the crises we are
faced with. What it will offer is a conceptual vocabulary, or linchpin,
robust enough to compel social and political action aimed at a
reorientation of our relationship to the earth, ourselves and Others.
My ‘home’ discipline, Cultural Studies, is similarly ambivalent to a
singular location. Implicitly interdisciplinary, cultural theory has been
referred to as an ‘outlaw’ discipline that borrows extensively from
other, more ‘traditional’ modes of academic inquiry (White and
Schwoch 2006: 3). Stuart Hall has written of cultural studies as a
‘conjunctural practice’ that emerges and morphs according to
specific social and political realities (1990: 11). Its objects of study,
methods and theoretical debts are exceptionally diverse, with
ongoing debate in the community as to whether the discipline has a
canon (Grossberg 2006; Nelson and Gaonkar 1996). The transitive
and kaleidoscopic nature of cultural studies has implications for
thinking through its academic (and general public) audience. Where
does this book belong?
This book draws on work in cultural theory, international relations,
political theory, philosophy, human geography, ecohumanities, media
studies, law, sociology, climate change science, religion and even
human evolution. It is informed by poststructuralism, deconstruction,
feminism, postcolonialism, ecology and scientific endeavours. Its
methods include ‘deconstruction’ (as uncomfortable as this is in
relation to the designation as a method),8 discourse analysis,
philosophical inquiry, and even a dip into ethnography and
qualitative methods (interviews). In other words, as an academic
enterprise, this book invites its scholarly audience and general
readers to negotiate hospitality. As Friese writes, the register of
hospitality extends to ‘academic practices which are to re-present
social worlds. Thus what is at stake is not only the thinking of
hospitality, but thinking as hospitality’ (2004: 74).
For Law, the world must be understood to be a ‘generative flux
that produces realities’ (2004: 7). Part and parcel of this view is the
assumption that the world cannot be tidily arranged into structures
(2004: 7). Instead, it is useful to understand it as
‘We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life.’
Hannah Arendt1
LOCAL ADAPTATION
Adaptation has entered common parlance as a term that connotes
the ability of something or someone to fit into or adjust to a specific
context. Yet its linguistic history reveals some difficult conceptual
knots that continue to haunt its application. Already by the early
twentieth century the notion of adaptation was contentious. The
trouble was that it tended to posit inherent capacities towards
survival or extinction. The French biologist Lucien Cuénot argued
that adaptation was fundamentally ‘a “frightening question” because
of the philosophical and metaphysical considerations that it
presupposes’ (Simonet 2010). This contention arose because Darwin
promoted the idea that adaptation was part of the law of nature. As
part and parcel of natural law, adaptation was conceived of as both
out of the control of human will, as well as incompatible with the
belief in a divine power. In other words, adaptation was regarded as
random.
This evolutionary legacy brings with it an understanding of
‘change’ as, at least to some degree, predetermined or biologically
coded. Organisms find themselves thrown into an environment in
which they are either genetically well equipped to survive or else at
great risk of extinction. The continuation of the species relies on the
painstakingly slow biological adaptations that may or may not occur
over millennia, not the choices that the living beings make during
their limited lifespan, or the grand plan of a deity pulling the strings
from on high. At its worst, an evolutionary take on adaptation was
adopted by Social Darwinists and used to justify forms of colonial
exploitation and violence against Indigenous peoples throughout the
world who were said to be genetically inferior or ‘maladaptive’ and
therefore doomed to extinction (Head 2010: 234).
In evolutionary terms, the drive for survival may be able to explain
why certain adaptations occur. However, it cannot give us a rich
understanding of the lively and relational world that we actively
participate in and alter as human beings. Thus the explanatory
power of evolutionary biology is not designed to provide a platform
for approaching the social challenges of anthropogenic climate
change. Climate change may have initially been conceived of as a
scientific problem but it has become an issue that challenges us to
re-examine our ethical and political paradigms. Human-induced
climate change requires a more dynamic understanding of
adaptation as a process involving multiple overlapping biological,
environmental, social, political and psychological factors. How we
understand and apply the concept of adaptation reveals to us what
we value and how we conceive of our relationship to others and the
earth. Thus, a primary question emerges: whose adaptations are we
supporting and how?
As we have moved away from a purely evolutionary account of
adaptation, its meaning has been revised and expanded. Adaptive
strategies are now viewed as flexible, rather than fixed, as we learn
to come to grips with the contingent nature of all things (Head 2010:
235). That is, the future is not predetermined by our genetic
inheritance. Moreover, myriad conditions give rise to complex
formations which inherently change over time. Within the humanistic
discipline of sociology, for instance, adaptation refers to the
‘reciprocal actions’ of the environmental and social domains
(Simonet 2010). From a psychological perspective we are attuned to
the ‘unceasing interaction between Man [sic] and the ever-changing
world within which he evolves’ (Simonet 2010).2
An interactive approach to adaptation, which does not make use
of evolutionary logic, is evident in the UNFCCC’s working definition:
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