Abstract

Life Adrift critically engages with two of the most defining issues of our contemporary global political economy: migration and climate change.

In their own right, both are discrete areas of politics, theory, practice, and resistance. But as climate and migration are increasingly imagined together as a singular relation, they are giving rise to new horizons of meaning in politics, philosophy, media, art and literature. Life Adrift is a collection of essays from across the interpretive social sciences and humanities which treats climate change and migration as a relation that demands theoretical and historical explanation, rather than a problem requiring technical and expert solutions. The result is a unique collection, offering readers a means for reconceptualising migration and environmental changes as a site of politics and of political possibility. Along the way it addresses a range of topics current in cultural and political theory, including democracy, place, neoliberalism, humanism, materiality, borders, affect, race and sexuality. If climate change stands to redistribute humans and material across the globe, then Life Adrift offers a set of critical resources for analysing this coming phenomenon and reimaging what it might mean to be political in a fully immanent world of bodies in flux.
An exciting collection that explores the very real crises an increasingly global order face as the impact of climate change and the movements of refugees and immigrants becomes ever more striking. This book provides real insight into what the imminent future promises: unprecedented ecological upheavals and the increasing displacement of millions of subjects. Highly recommended and urgently needed!
Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University, USA
Andrew Baldwin is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography, Durham University. From 2011-2015, he chaired COST Action IS1101 Climate change and migration: knowledge, law and policy, and theory, a pan-European research network of social scientists and humanists. His research examines the intersections of race, whiteness, migration and climate change.

Giovanni Bettini is Lecturer in International Development and Climate Politics at Lancaster University. His research focuses on the genealogy and political effects of discourses on climate change, population, and development, with a particular interest in the connections between climate change, adaptation and mobility.
The way we understand the causes and effects of migration has a huge impact on how we treat those people labelled as ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’. This excellent book assembles leading critics across several disciplines who challenge emerging orthodoxies and stereotypes about climate change and human movement. In what some regard as a ‘post-truth’ age, we need reasoned and evidence-based analysis more than ever and this book provides it.
Noel Castree, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester