Crisis of imagination/(re)imaginations for a (climate) crisis

Abstract This themed intervention emerges from a Chair's Plenary during the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual Conference 2023 on the theme of ‘Climate Changed Geographies’ and addresses geographers and allied social scientists. Drawing on Amitav Ghosh's provocation, it asks if our work on climate change is facing a crisis of imagination. Human geography has historically framed climate change as primarily an environmental problem and fallen short of imagining it as a concern central to the discipline. This, in turn, has prevented human geography from becoming a concern central to climate change. Human geographers have been relegated to primarily being analysts of societal responses rather than their organisers. Following Ghosh, this themed intervention frames climate change as a crisis of imagination and brings together seven scholars to offer some (re)imaginations for this (climate) crisis. The intervention identifies Western hegemony, and a continuing desire to maintain and extend it, as a central cause for this crisis, and makes space mainly for scholars from/of the Global South. Emerging from a varied set of positionalities, they raise three main points. First, historical injustices are central to defining the climate change problem and devising its solutions. Second, the question of coloniality – legitimacy of diverse knowledges, extraction of knowledges, hegemony of knowledges – and a need for pushback against structures of knowledge production that maintain Western hegemony, stays prominent. Third, the idea of reimagining relationships based on solidarity, shared but differential vulnerabilities, responsibilities and care becomes prominent. Scholarly work is unquestionably structured by and sometimes props up the systems of racism, imperialism, violence and hierarchies of power. A profound and radical response to climate change can only come through systems change, and our job is to analyse, initiate, and accelerate those justice‐oriented systems changes which will most effectively deaccelerate climate change.