The new IFSH Research Report series publishes the recent work of our IFSH members. In the first issue, Ann-Kathrin Benner and Delf Rothe – together with Sara Ullström and Johannes Stripple from the University of Lund – discuss the role of violence in collective imaginaries of climate change.
Many policy and media actors portray climate change as a source or even a form of violence – for example as a trigger of international conflict or mass migration. Other, less spectacular forms of violence, however, are often silenced in such discourses – think for example of the creeping and less-visible destruction of whole landscapes through the extraction of fossil fuels. In their research report, Benner and colleagues study how violent imaginaries of climate change are produced and how they spread in the fields of science, popular culture and politics. Furthermore, they discuss to what extend imaginaries of climate change can exert forms of violence themselves.
The research report results from a long-term cooperation of the Universities of Hamburg and Lund led by Delf Rothe and Johannes Stripple. From February 11-12, researchers from both institutions came together at the IFSH for a two-day interdisciplinary workshop on “violent climate imaginaries”.