Sensing and making sense of climate change in a Western European urban setting: Bodily exposures, uncertain epistemologies, and climatic care practices

Abstract

This article probes the crucial role of the body, embodiment, and sensation in the way people encounter large-scale processes of climate change in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Exploring how urban denizens in one of the more temperate regions of the world come to know, speak, and conceptualize climate change in their everyday life, we aim to revitalize a conceptual engagement with embodiment and sensation as meaningful modes of knowing and situating the large-scale realities of climate change. Drawing on a series of group conversations with diverse urban dwellers, we empirically (1) highlight moments, settings, and practices within which climate change is sensed as a local and material reality; (2) trace recurring epistemological questions and anxieties that arise around the register of sense-able experience; and (3) show how moments, settings, and practices within which climate change appears as a sense-able reality generate novel forms of what we coin climatic care practices, in which people try to modulate and manage their exposure to changing climatic conditions in the city. In our conclusion, we underscore the multiple and fragmented character of climate change in the everyday lives, knowledges, and practices of these city dwellers; reflect on methodological possibilities to further address climate change as an everyday reality in Western urban settings; and emphasize the urgency of attuning to climate change as a sensed, in addition to a cognitively known or contested, reality at the level of social theory as well as policy-making.