Reimagining Climate Migration: Discursive and Embodied Reorientations to Land Through Gardening with Newcomer Youth of Colour

• In Event: 21064 - Environment, Climate Change, and Mobility

Abstract

Conventional definitions around climate migration and climate refugees focus on displacements caused by climate events and international border crossings (Kartiki 2011; Khanom & Rutherford 2022). Recent work in critical refugee studies has called on migration scholars to rethink such narrow definitions as they reduce migrating peoples and the causes of their migration to bureaucratic categories that rely on and reproduce statist, hegemonic narratives of migration (Purkayastha, 2018). This paper takes up this call by re-examining definitions of climate migration and climate refugees from a global Southern perspective (Banerjee & Connell, 2018). Drawing from a community gardening project with newcomer youth of colour from a multitude of homelands and migration journeys taking place in their host community of Calgary, AB, we sketch out a series of reorientations toward land and climate through migration offered by these youth. In the context of inhabiting a new city, the youth’s embodied and discursive orientations toward the garden as connected physically to their homeland, as a more-than-human part of their community, and as situated within the broader environment suggest an expansive vision of how climate is implicated in migration. Centering care in these embodied and discursive approaches to land, these newcomer youth of colour trouble an understanding of climate migration as a product of climate events alone, situating climate migration in terms of war, displacement, and disconnection from land.

Authors

• Riann Lognon, University of Calgary

• Pallavi Banerjee, University of Calgary

• Chetna Khandelwal, University of Calgary

• Megha Sanyal, University of Calgary

• Santanu Dutta, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary