[Commlist] Call for Papers - Reimagining Climate (Im)mobilities in the Panicocene

*Call for Papers*

*Reimagining Climate (Im)mobilities in the Panicocene
*
8-9 May 2025
Durham University

Keynote speakers
Professor Mimi Sheller, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (TBC)
Professor T.J. Demos, UC, Los Angeles (TBC)

Organizers
Professor Andrew Baldwin, Durham University
Dr. Elena Giacomelli, Marie-Curie Fellow, University of Bologna

Climate change and global mobility are two of the most defining – and 
borderless – challenges of our time. This conference offers a space to 
consider how visual aesthetics and narrative have been used to frame 
these challenges together and with what consequences. The conference is 
premised on the idea that while terms like ‘climate migration’, ‘climate 
refugee’, and ‘trapped’ and ‘immobile’ populations have been subject to 
relentless criticism over the last decade (Farbotko 2017; Bettini 2013; 
Felli, 2013; Baldwin, Frohlich, and Rothe 2019; Boas et al. 2019, 2022; 
Durand-Delacre et al. 2021), together these same notions  remain an 
enduring feature of the climate change political imaginary (Baldwin 2022).

One aspect of this imaginary, especially in Western media, concerns the 
way politicized migration narratives often mix with climate change to 
produce a discourse of threat. The result is that when climate 
change-induced migration is mediated, this is often in the language of 
insecurity rather than the reduction of social inequality or 
vulnerability. The “Panicocene” (Giacomelli 2023) refers to our current 
era, in which climate change and migration meet in a distorted 
narrative, an amplified emergency that foments anxiety and can lead to 
discrimination. Visual aesthetics—whether photography, visual arts, 
film, news and social media—and narrative continue to play a vital role 
in sustaining this imaginary by promoting such distorted narratives. The 
conference aims to expand our understanding of discourses on ‘climate 
change and human mobility’ by focussing squarely on how visual 
aesthetics have come to shape these discourses and why. A small body of 
work explored this question almost a decade ago (Methmann and Rothe, 
2014; McKee 2011).

Our central concern is thus to reanimate the question of framing by 
exploring what a methodological focus on visual aesthetics and 
narratives adds to the already expansive critical debate around climate 
change and human mobility? How is the figure of the climate 
migrant/refugee depicted visually? What visual and narrative tropes can 
be observed in such depictions? Do such depictions function 
allegorically? If so, what can they tell us about the meaning of the 
climate crisis? Some of the other questions we hope to address include: 
How do visual and media narratives imagine linkages between climate 
change and human mobility? How do visual art and performance, film, 
photography, graphic novels and comics, differ in the way they portray 
images of migration from those depicted in mainstream media such as 
television, social networks, and newspapers? To what extent are migrants 
involved in the development of new forms of visual media and their 
intersection with climate and (im)mobilities? How might we understand 
the notion of ‘audience’ when considering climate change, human mobility 
and visual aesthetics? What kind of audience is assumed and/or produced 
by visual aesthetic practices that depict climate change and human 
mobility? And finally, what role could visual aesthetics play in 
re-narrating the relationship between climate change and human mobility 
beyond its conventional vocabularies of security, humanitarian crisis 
and liberal modes of adaptation?.

We invite academic contributions from across the interpretive social 
sciences and humanities, as well as from journalists, practitioners and 
artists operating in/through different visual narratives and media fields.

Call for Contributions

We welcome proposals for 15-minute papers. Please submit your abstract 
using this Google form. <https://forms.gle/uPo8kCqYHfWfshFQ9> The 
deadline to propose a paper is 1 January 2023. Notification of 
acceptance will be communicated by the end of February 2025. *No payment 
from the authors will be required.*
Questions can be addressed to: 
(elena.giacomelli4 /at/ unibo.it)<mailto:(elena.giacomelli4 /at/ unibo.it)>; 
(w.a.baldwin /at/ durham.ac.uk)<mailto:(w.a.baldwin /at/ durham.ac.uk)>.

References
Baldwin, A. (2022). The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, 
Migration, Humanism, London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Baldwin, W. A., Fröhlich, C., & Rothe, D. (2019). From Climate Migration 
to Anthropocene Mobilities: Shifting the Debate; Editors introduction. 
Mobilities, 14(3): 289-297.
Bettini G. (2013). Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A critique of 
apocalyptic narratives
on ‘climate refugees’. Geoforum, 45: 63-72.
Boas, I., Wiegel, H., Farbotko, C., Warner, J., & Sheller, M. (2022). 
Climate mobilities: migration, im/mobilities and mobility regimes in a 
changing climate. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(14): 
3365–3379.
Boas I., Farbotko C., Adams H., Sterly H., Bush S., van der Geest K., 
Wiegel H., Ashraf H., Baldwin A., Bettini G., Blondin S., de Bruijn M., 
Durand-Delacre D., Fröhlich C., Gioli G., Guaita L., Hut E., Jarawura 
F.X., Lamers M., Lietaer S., Nash S.L., Piguet E., Rothe D., Sakdapolrak 
P., Smith L., Tripathy Furlong B., Turhan E., Warner J., Zickgraf C., 
Black R., Hulme M. (2019). Climate migration myths. Nature climate 
change, 9(11): 901-903.
Durand-Delacre D., Bettini G., Nash S.L., Sterly H., Gioli G., Hut E., 
Boas I., Farbotko C., Sakdapolrak P., de Bruijn M., Tripathy Furlong B., 
van der Geest K., Lietaer S., Hulme M. (2021). Climate Migration Is 
about People, Not Numbers, in Böhm S., Sullivan S. (eds.), Negotiating 
Climate Change in Crisis, Open Book Publishers, pp. 63-82.
Farbotko, C. (2017). Representation and Misrepresentation of Climate 
Migrants. In Research Handbook on Climate Change, Migration and the law, 
edited by B. Mayer and F. Crépeau, 67–84. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 
Publishing.
Felli, R. (2013). Managing Climate Insecurity by Ensuring Continuous 
Capital Accumulation: ‘Climate Refugees’ and ‘Climate Migrants’. New 
Political Economy, 18 (3): 337–363.
Giacomelli, E. (2023). Panicocene. Narrazioni su cambiamenti climatici, 
regimi di mobilità e migrazioni ambientali. Milano: FrancoAngeli.
McKee, Y. (2011). On ‘Climate Refugees'”: Biopolitics, Aesthetics, and 
Critical Climate Change. Qui Parle, Spring, 19(2): 309-325.
Methmann, Y. and Rothe D. (2014). Tracing the spectre that haunts 
Europe: the visual construction of climate-induced migration in the MENA 
region. Critical Security Studies, 2(2): 162-179.


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