The affective lives of climate change: Versions, mediations, forms-of-living

Human geography has witnessed a burgeoning interest in what are known as climate affects, climate emotions, or climate feelings. This work presumes that, in some way, climate change is lived affectively. However, in the main this work centres forms of event-based distress, where it is people's experience or vicarious witnessing of disasters and environmental changes that invokes climate feeling. In this paper, we set out an approach to a wider and wilder set of ‘climate change affects’ – defined as all the ways in which climate change is related to affectively. Because they are of the everyday, such climate change affects are overdetermined, articulated with and conditioned by more than what is attributed to or associated with climate change. From this affirmation of overdetermination, we set out an approach to understanding the conditions of possibility and emergence for climate change affects. One that diagnoses: the versions of climate change that condition how climate change can be felt; the mediations through which climate change is made present; and the forms-of-living , with their patterns and scenes of attachment, through which climate change is (not)encountered. The result is a mode of inquiry that aims to follow the many affective lives of climate change.