Earth Futures: communities and stressed environments
This theme explores how human earth futures are connected to challenging conditions and stressed environments. We investigate the social, political and ecological dynamics of people and communities and interrogate how stress generates threatening circumstances for collective life.
Key foci include:
- Politics of communities and stressed environments – identifying how governance, inequality and power shape both exposure to collective stress and a politics of response
- Displacement and adaptation – questioning how and why people move, stay or transform practices in relation to changing climate, politics and environments
- Mental health and emotional geographies – understand lived geographies of mental ill-health and futures of collective mental health under the press of environmental change
- Viral, health and multispecies geographies – visioning and intervening in entangled health risks and new forms of ecological interdependence
- Environmental and climate justice, including just transitions – examining uneven impacts and collective strategies for justice and environmental citizenships
Our approach is grounded in an ethics of care, attending to how people live with, mitigate and reimagine communities and stressed environments. We draw out questions of scale, space, place and justice, working across human geography, political ecology, environmental humanities and critical health studies to work towards more equitable futures.