Climate, Displacement and the Posthuman
How can we rethink urban spaces and migration through a planetary lens amid the climate crisis?
The relationship between climate and displacement is complex, yet research on these topics often focuses on purely technological solutions. This research priority area invites a deeper understanding of these twin topics by bringing together different and diverse perspectives on planetary knowledge and displacement. Key questions include:
- How do definitions of the urban transform in the face of increasing unsettlement and displacement, non-belonging, and planetary uninhabitability?
- How can we resist the racialised narratives around migration permeating our responses to the climate?
- How does the technological intersect with the planetary, and how can posthuman and digital identities address questions of displacement and belonging?
- What forms of future thinking, witnessing and memorialisation are needed on a dying planet?
This approach reconsiders urban spatiality through the planetary; urban temporalities as spanning across the geologic and the molecular; and urban narrative as myth, lore and ritual inflected through the digital and the posthuman.
Learn more
- Project: UCL Global Engagement Fund project on climate and culture in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan
- Project: Topological Atlas: An ERC-funded project, on the counter-geographies of migrants as they encounter the security apparatus of the border
- Article: 'Decolonization Anyone? Reparations, Repair, and Life in the Aftermath of Disaster' in the Berliner Gazette
- Podcast: OBJECTHOOD #9 with Nishat Awan (Radio Web MACBA)
Professor of Architecture & Visual Culture, Urban Lab Director of Research
Nishat Awan is Professor of Architecture & Visual Culture and the Urban Lab's Director of Research. Nishat's research and writing focus on diasporas, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places.