On loss,limits and the possibilities of critical geographic thought in a climate-changed world

Abstract

In her paper, Savannah Cox makes a compelling argument regarding the general failure of contemporary urban thought to account for ongoing climate-linked losses – and the irreversible material changes they entail – in both its theorizing of urban change and futurity and the conceptual tools and vocabularies that underpin underlying modes of critique. Cox challenges urban thinkers to move beyond rhetorics attuned only to struggle and possibility, and to take seriously the forms of climate change-induced losses that can neither be remedied nor redeemed. Instead, Cox argues for the need to recalibrate urban thought around loss, limits and exhaustion grounded in the climate-changed worlds we currently inhabit. Following Cox, I contend that this current conjuncture presents a unique opportunity for critical scholars to better ground ourselves in the here and now, and to take seriously and learn from the novel modes of politics, decolonial praxes and collective struggles being led by frontline and climate-impacted communities in the face of the ongoing climate catastrophe. I draw from decolonial scholarship and the Black Radical Tradition to develop a basis for using catastrophe as a foundational starting point to theorize, resist and imagine radically new worlds and ways of being amidst the enduring conditions brought on by irreversible climate-linked losses.