Cultural Politics of Climate Change: Interactions in Everyday Spaces

Abstract

In this chapter, we connect the more formal spaces of climate science, policy and politics operating at multiple scales to those of the spaces of the ‘everyday’. Climate change is a high-stakes, high-profile and highly politicized issue that relates-often in messy, non-linear and diffuse ways-to people’s everyday lives, lifestyles and livelihoods. It is no longer thought of merely as scientific issue; rather, the ‘climate question’ is considered one that now, more than ever, permeates our individual, as well as shared, economic, political, cultural and social lives. Through a brief accounting of these interactions, we explore some interesting and notable spaces comprising what we see as the emerging cultural politics of climate change at the scale of the everyday discourses, representations and ‘popular’ cultures that work to engage society. By cultural politics we mean those oft-contested and politicized processes by which meaning is constructed and negotiated across space, place and at various scales. This involves not only the representations and messages that gain traction in discourses, but also those that are absent from them or silenced (Derrida 1978; Dalby 2007). In these spaces, discourses are tethered to positionalities, material realities and social practices (Hall 1997). As David Harvey has commented, ‘struggles over representation are as fundamental to the activities of place construction as bricks and mortar’ (1990, 422, emphasis added). By examining these features as manifestations of ongoing and contested processes, we can consider questions regarding how power flows through the capillaries of our shared social, cultural and political body, constructing knowledge, norms, conventions, truths and untruths (Foucault 1980). Such dynamic interactions form nexuses of power-knowledge that shape how we come to understand things as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ and, in turn, contribute to managing the conditions and tactics of our social lives (de Certeau 1984). However, rather than brash imposition of law or direct disciplinary techniques, we consider how more subtle power-knowledge regimes in, for example, the likes of the arts, sports and celebrities, permeate and create what becomes ‘permissible’ and ‘normal’ as well as ‘desired’ in everyday discourses, practices and institutional processes (Foucault 1977).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.