My research is at the intersection of political and cultural geography, critical International Relations and studies of race and racialisation. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the relationship between the politics of climate change and fluctuating conceptions of the ‘human’, ‘nature’, and categories of social difference. Additionally, my research is animated by the following provocation: what happens to issues of ‘climate change’, ‘the environment’ or ‘nature’ when they are pulled into and spoken of in an ‘international’ frame?
My academic interests broadly fall into the following themes and topics:
- The ‘international’ and its institutional histories (politics) and geographies
- The politics of climate justice and other justice claims within international climate change discourses
- The production of the categories of ‘human’ and ‘nature’, particularly in the context of debates around the Anthropocene and in relation to postcolonial and critical race theories
- The methodological possibilities presented by the ‘international’ as research site and agenda.
You can read more about the different strands of my academic research to date by clicking on the headings below.
PhD research: climate justice, race and the international (2017 – 2022)
I completed my PhD in Human Geography at Durham University, UK in 2022. My PhD thesis, Climate Justice and the adaptation of the human, is a close analysis of ‘climate justice’ as it appears within, and conditions, institutional politics of climate change. My doctoral work makes a new contribution in that it takes the category of ‘climate justice’ and places it in productive conversation with postcolonial theory, critical race theory and theories of the (post)human. It also locates ‘climate justice in relation to the ‘international’; entailing a focused examination of how it is implicated in histories and politics of the ‘international’ as a structurally and substantially racialised edifice.
This thesis points to two important factors currently overlooked in existing framings of climate (in)justice. First, it underlines how ‘climate justice’ functions as an allusion to race, or more precisely that climate change is not only an ethical problem, but also a political and economic one that reveals the international order as fundamentally racialised. Second, it shows how ‘climate justice’ enables the resignification of climate change as not principally a crisis of ‘the environment’, but of the human. In the round, this thesis explores the ways in which ‘climate justice’ reconsolidates, and functions as a proxy for, white humanism, and as a site of and for the circulation of racial power. To this end, the thesis evidences how ‘climate justice’ reconsolidates the ‘human’ as it unfolds across three distinct but interrelated registers: the liberal international as an order of governance, the category of the ‘most vulnerable’ to climate change, and the adaptation of the ‘human’.
I am currently working on academic publications derived from my PhD research, details of which will be posted on the ‘My writing’ page of this website.
Small businesses and Covid regulation research (2022 – 2023)
‘Future Families’: my ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Project (2023 – )
In 2023-2024, I have an Economic and Social Research Council-funded Fellowship at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. As part of this, I will be conducting a pilot research project called ‘Future Families: Climate Justice, Intimate Life and the Adaptation of the Human’. A brief description of this project is provided below.
The climate emergency and societal responses to it are playing out at all levels of politics, the economy and culture. However, these will also necessarily play out in the “everyday spaces” of social reproduction (Katz 2018: 725): the ‘private’, intimate sphere of families and households. In other words, the climate emergency is reconfiguring social life and the future aspirations that underpin it (see Katz 2018). The fact that humanity is now the single largest force acting on the planetary environment (the so-called ‘Anthropocene’) has shifted discussion of the human into a new register (e.g. Chakrabarty 2009). All over the world, people are re-evaluating their expectations about what it means to live a ‘human life’ in anticipation of a highly uncertain climatic future. For some, albeit people in wealthy, industrialised countries, this is contributing to decisions to not have (more) children, while the narrative of individual solutions positions these reproductive decisions alongside lifestyle adjustments such as adopting a vegan diet or giving up cars (e.g. Carrington 2017; Hunt 2019; Scheinman 2019).
In my PhD research, I argued that our understandings of what it means to be ‘human’ are adapting to climate change. Building on this, I will investigate the growing phenomenon of (in)voluntary childlessness in response to climate change to show how the domain of (social) reproduction is, and will be, a critical space in which responses to the climate emergency will play out, and how the human is adapting to climate change. While many media narratives present the decision not to have (more) children as simply another consumer choice among others (for a critique see Crist 2020), my qualitative, feminist research will complicate this by giving voice to participants’ diverse, situated understandings of their (non)reproductive choices in relation to the climate emergency. Furthermore, I aim to provide insights on whether participants are cultivating alternative practices of family- and kin-making.
To these ends, I have identified the following research questions: 1) (How) do participants understand their (non)reproductive choices to be related to the climate emergency, and adaptation to it? and 2) (How) do they relate these choices to what it means to be ‘human’? Finally, I will ask 3) What kind of alternative family relationships, if any, are participants cultivating following their decisions not to have any (more) children?
Matilda Fitzmaurice 