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

我的研究探讨了气候紧急情况如何改变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安全、健康和充实地生活的期望。在许多关于气候紧急情况的政治和媒体对话中，重点是如何在治理，能源，交通，食品和住房等领域重组和改造我们的社会。尽管所有这些问题都很重要，但它们往往忽视了这样一个事实，即如果要发生这些变化，所需的变化将取决于我们在家庭和家庭的“日常空间”中如何过私人生活的变化。我的博士研究调查了大约2009年至2019年期间，“气候正义”的概念在国际气候政治中是如何被使用和理解的。通过分析大量的文件、对国际气候专家的采访以及对国际气候变化事件的观察，我证明了“气候正义”越来越多地被用作气候变化和气候行动的框架，并强调了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，它将气候变化视为一个社会正义和“人类”问题，以及影响自然环境的问题。然而，我也认为，除了简单地提供一个框架，通过它我们可以不同地理解气候危机，“气候正义”向我们展示了人类的形象-以及成为人类的意义-正在适应气候变化。我的博士研究结果表明，询问“人类”如何适应气候变化的重要性。因此，我的新研究通过提出一个特定的领域来发展这一领域的现有知识，在这个领域中，人类正在改变他们对气候变化世界中生活和未来的期望：他们的私人家庭生活。对于富裕的工业化国家的一些人来说，气候紧急情况促使他们决定少生孩子，或者根本不生孩子。换句话说，他们对家庭和家庭生活的看法不同。为了更仔细地研究这一点，我将对那些由于与气候紧急情况有关的原因而决定不生（更多）孩子的人进行深入的传记式采访和焦点小组。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以来自愿无子女、家庭规模和气候紧急情况的。其次，它将揭示参与者是否以及如何培养任何类型的替代家庭结构或关系。除了为学术奖学金做出贡献外，这项研究的结果还将引起政策制定者、非政府组织和文化组织的兴趣，这些组织致力于就我们如何在气候紧急情况下生活进行包容性的、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.