Huub Dijstelbloem

In this lecture, Huub Dijstelbloem seeks to investigate parallels, contrasts, and possible transversal relationships between climate adaptation and migration policies. Policies on these issues are constantly navigating under the threat of introducing extreme infrastructures, which claim to solve the problems and make alternative paths impossible. Whereas climate adaptation policies increasingly emphasize the use of flexible instruments to make societies more resilient to climate change, fortification and weaponization have returned with a vengeance in migration policy. The lecture will elaborate on several traditions of STS-research to detect novel conceptual, empirical, and political questions to stimulate STS’ technopolitical imagination. Working with the notions of social sorting and boundary infrastructures, the lecture will analyze the tensions between the underlying technics and politics of different categorizations of climate mobility and non-mobility, such as environmental migration, climate migration, disaster displacement, managed retreat, refugees, and victims. Using research on visualization and surveillance, parallels between the scientific-technological apparatus to monitor climate change and the development of databases and information systems that monitor migration and displacement will be drawn. Specific attention will be paid to the question of which kinds of knowledge and expertise and which kind of experts are involved in the analysis of environmental and climate migration and how this affects the nature of these analyses and monitoring systems, including the analysis of the mobility of nonhuman animals (e.g. bird migration and other wildlife circulation) as they shift their habitat ranges to track their ecological niches. How does this affect research approaches and the organization of knowledge, for instance when fields such as biodiversity and migration studies are turned into ‘crisis disciplines’? Is redefining research areas useful to circumvent the introduction of extreme infrastructures in adapting to climate change and international migration in Europe?