Epilogue

By Flora Bartlett - November 21, 2019

This year has seen climate change physically ravage environments and communities across the world, and we have also seen a new level of public engagement stretching out into media discourses and private conversation. Activists are gaining celebrity status, bringing social media coverage and a new kind of response to this global crisis - a response that joins the ongoing work being done by many around the world to deal with the multitude of problems and new realities brought by global warming and extreme weather events.  

In this era of extreme climatic events, this autumn series aimed to examine how weather and climate change are experienced around the world. There are many disciplines engaging with the climate in all its forms, and this series’ call was deliberately open: any discipline, any fieldsite, any stage of research. We welcomed contributions that were short and creative, and our submissions included short film, animation, fieldnotes, and photography. 

Rasmus Rodineliussen’s visually compelling piece complicates the positioning of Scandinavian countries as ‘forerunners in environmental management’ as the Baltic Sea is increasingly polluted with rubbish, fertilisers and the impacts of rising temperatures. 

Visual media was also used to communicate the close, personal relationships communities have with their local landscapes. We saw Lorenzo Ferrarini’s film ‘Living the Weather’, exploring experience of weather in Yorkshire in five connecting narratives with evocative footage of place. This spoke to the shorter film by Elizabeth Rahman and Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan, which explored the ways extreme weather can be summoned by mistake by surfers in the Canary Islands. Both films entangle close-up footage with narration and personal accounts, bringing the viewer in to the details of place and weather. Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows’ film is an animated account of the architectural process, visually guiding us into the applied mechanisms of working with a community to build on monsoon grounds in remote Bangladesh. As Tanya Matthan wrote in her piece, the monsoon has become increasingly unpredictable, and is shaking up the market operations in Malwa as the rhythms of both monsoon and market are deeply intertwined. 

Saleh Ahmed examines the response to climate stresses in Bangladesh, exploring both tensions and collaborations in the face of coastal erosion, flooding and cyclones. His discussion of Climate Field Schools suggests a way forward in addressing adaptive capacity through discursive spaces. In southern Greater Buenos Aires, Vanina P. Santy also examines the response to climate change but focusses on resistance: protests against real-estate projects destroying public land and exacerbating climate impacts.  

 Alongside the pieces exploring climate change and weather within communities, we also saw a number of more personal pieces placing the role of the researcher in the midst of the text. Kendra Jewell’s vivid writing took a personal tone as an account of arriving to fieldwork in the early stages of hurricane Dorian, and Laura Burke’s creative piece mixed her own fieldnotes with ethnographic reflection in discussing the meaning of ‘cold’ and its relationship with fertility among her participants. Both of these contributions remind us that scholars are not objective, removed bodies writing only of the experience of others in weather matters. As Laura Burke writes, ‘it is so cold that I feel it in my bones’. 

In an extreme jump from the earthly contributions discussed above, A.R.E Taylor took us on a journey first into space and then back to earth with his exploration of space weather and the impacts it can have on our terrestrial systems. This widened our perspectives of what we mean by ‘weather’, expanding it to the solar system and reminding us of the relationship earth has to its surroundings.  

The pieces connected across scales and perspectives, ranging from outer space to the very ground on which we build. Different materialities are woven throughout the series, all reminding us that weather and climate change are felt in the body, in the community, and in the infrastructures we produce. Thank you to all of our contributors for this engaging series, and to Steph Matti for her co-editing and support.

Weather Matters will continue to publish standalone pieces throughout the winter, so do submit articles of 400-1000 words in length and, of course, film and visual media. We will be sending out a new call for papers for our Spring Series in early January. 

Flora Bartlett - Editor of Weather Matters