(Re)framing the politics of climate change: resilience, reparative critique and affective life in situations of extreme heat

One of the ways we know climate change is through the emergencies that make it present. But how does the connection between singular events (emergencies) and a meta-stable condition (climate change) become perceivable to us? Through what forms of knowledge? And with what implications for the politics of climate change governance? I take these questions up by exploring government-orchestrated efforts to enhance climate resilience through cultivating shared feelings of awareness during emergencies. To analyze the significance of these practices for the politics of climate resilience, the paper pursues an alternative pathway to ‘paranoid’ critiques that reduce resilience to neoliberalism; instead bringing resilience into dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s notion of situations. Situations diversify our understanding of emergencies by prompting us to explore them fundamentally as ruptures in people’s ongoing affective encounter with the world. But situations also capture how our experience of emergencies is colored by the broader historical significance they hold as critical events that change collective life. As with all affect-laden events, however, situations are also the subject of mediation. Thinking with situations, then, I unpack the power-laden modes of affective mediation that influence shared sensitivities of the relationship between emergencies, on one hand, and climate change as an epochal condition, on the other. By distributing responsibility across various sites, resilience allows a wide catalogue of voices to influence common perceptions of this relationship and, consequently, evidences potential to further integrate what Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick calls reparative critique into climate consciousness by highlighting the ramifications climate-related emergencies have on specific communities because of ongoing environmental harms visited upon them through time. I make this argument through research into the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to raise situational awareness of extreme heat risk. While seeking to mobilize people’s embodied knowledges in sensing imminent danger, these practices push concurrently for understanding climate change vulnerability as entangled with violent processes that underpinned the modernization projects fundamental to life in America now