Wednesday, April 17, 2024 – POSTPONED
Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress, next January 2025! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work! At this session, next year, we will hear from visiting postdoctoral fellow Anna Bridel.
As climate change impacts intensify there are growing calls for alternative life-worlds to be imagined and brought in to being through the inclusion of local voices in environmental policymaking. At the same time, research has shown that platforming local environmental knowledge can often lead to an unexpected continuation of pre-existing relations of knowledge, politics and climate vulnerability. In this work in progress, Bridel will discuss ethnographic fieldwork from Kerala, India, where Cyclone Ockhi led to the death of over 200 fishers in 2017 but local fishing communities have been unable to influence dominant approaches to governing storm risk. In doing so Bridel will seek to develop the concept of ‘epistemic vulnerability’ as interactions between processes of making authoritative knowledge about the environment and vulnerabilization, to understand how fisher needs become silenced. Bridel gratefully welcomes any comments or feedback, especially on this analysis and the utility of epistemic vulnerability as a conceptual device.
Anna Bridel is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.