Environmental Mobilities 2: Climate Mobilities’ Progress on the Climate Mobile Subject

Abstract

This is the second progress report on environmental mobilities. It considers a burgeoning research focus on “climate mobilities,” reflecting on some of this subfield's conceptual quandaries and progress toward their possible resolution, particularly the ambiguity of the climate mobile subject. Currently, some climate mobilities research works toward refinement of climate mobilities as a set of calculative techniques. There is also emerging focus on the climate mobile subject as a sociopolitical construct, and a querying of whether climate mobility is indeed an empirically observable phenomenon at the individual scale. Climate mobilities seem poised to move away from seeking a unified metatheory, instead acknowledging multiple perspectives that are explicit about, and deployed precisely because of, their diverse theoretical and methodological opportunities and limitations.