Future Families: Climate Justice, Intimate Life and the Adaptation of the Human

我的研究问的是，气候紧急状态如何改变了我们对人类意义的理解。在世界各地，人们正在调整他们对如何在一个根本不确定的生态未来中过上安全、健康和充实的人类生活的期望。在许多关于气候紧急情况的政治和媒体讨论中，重点是如何在治理、能源、交通、食品和住房等领域重组和改变我们的社会。尽管所有这些问题都很重要，但它们往往忽视了一个事实，即如果它们要发生，所需的变化将取决于我们在家庭和家庭的“日常空间”中如何过我们的私人生活。我的博士研究调查了大约2009年至2019年期间，国际气候政治中如何使用和理解“气候正义”的理念。通过分析一系列广泛的文件、对国际气候专家的采访以及对国际气候变化事件的观察，我证明，‘气候正义’越来越多地被用作气候变化和气候行动的框架，并强调最贫穷国家的最贫穷人口将受到气候变化的影响。换句话说，它将气候变化作为一个社会正义和人类问题来讨论，而不仅仅是一个影响自然环境的问题。然而，我也认为，除了提供一个框架，让我们能够以不同的方式理解气候危机，“气候正义”还向我们表明，人类的形象--以及它对人类的意义--正在适应气候变化。我的博士研究结果表明，询问“人类”是如何适应气候变化的重要性。因此，我的新研究发展了这一领域的现有知识，提出了一个特定的领域，在这个领域，人类正在改变他们对气候变化世界中自己的生活和未来的期望：他们的私人家庭生活。对于较富裕工业化国家的一些人来说，气候危机正在促使他们做出少生孩子或根本不生孩子的决定。换句话说，他们对家庭和家庭生活的想法是不同的。为了更深入地研究这一问题，我将对那些因气候紧急情况而决定不要(更多)孩子的人进行深入的传记采访和焦点小组。这将帮助我实现两个目标。首先，它将帮助我了解参与者是如何理解和决定长期自愿无子女、家庭规模和气候紧急情况的。其次，它将阐明参与者是否以及如何培养任何形式的替代家庭结构或关系。除了促进学术研究，这项研究的发现也将引起政策制定者、非政府组织和文化组织的兴趣，他们致力于就我们如何在气候紧急情况下生活进行包容、公开的集体对话。

My research asks how the climate emergency is changing our understandings of what it means to be human. All over the world, people are adjusting their expectations about how to live safe, healthy and fulfilling human lives in a radically uncertain ecological future. In much political and media conversation about the climate emergency, the focus is on how to reorganise and transform our societies in areas such as governance, energy, transport, food and housing. As important as all these questions are, they often overlook the fact that if they are to take place, the required changes will depend on changes to how we live our private lives, in the "everyday spaces" of the family and the household. My PhD research investigated how the idea of 'climate justice' is used and understood within international climate politics between approximately 2009 and 2019. By analysing an extensive set of documents, interviews with international climate experts and observations of international climate change events, I demonstrated that 'climate justice' is increasingly used as a frame for climate change and climate action, and one that highlights that the poorest people in the poorest countries will be affected by climate change. In other words, it talks about climate change as a social justice and 'human' issue as well as just one affecting the natural environment. However, I also argue that as well as simply providing a frame through which we can understand the climate crisis differently, 'climate justice' shows us that the figure of the human - and what it means to be human - are adapting to climate change. The findings of my PhD research indicate the importance of asking how 'the human' is adapting to climate change. Therefore, my new research develops existing knowledge in this area by proposing a specific domain in which humans are changing their expectations about their lives and futures in a climate-changed world: their private family lives. For some people in wealthier, industrialised countries, the climate emergency is contributing to decisions to have fewer children, or not to have children at all. In other words, they are thinking differently about what a family, and a family life, look like. To look at this more closely, I will conduct in-depth, biographical interviews and focus groups with people who have decided not to have (more) children for reasons related to the climate emergency. This will help me achieve two aims. First, it will help me build an understanding of how participants have understood and made up their minds about (in)voluntary childlessness, family size and the climate emergency over a long period of time. Second, it will shed light on whether and how participants are cultivating any kind of alternative family structures or relationships. As well as contributing to academic scholarship, the findings of this research will be of interest to policymakers, non-governmental and cultural organisations who are invested in an inclusive, publicly accessible collective conversation about how we live under the climate emergency.