Researching the hybrid geographies of climate change: Reflections from the field

Abstract

This special section grew out of a series of sessions on ‘Mixed methods and hybrid epistemologies’ at the Association of American Geographers annual meetings in 2013 and 2014. The five papers that comprise it each examine climate change as a mixed or hybrid entity, and consider some of the theoretical and methodological tensions associated with contemporary climate change research. In so doing, the authors reflect on the challenges of field-based observation and measurement, and they draw on a rich array of conceptual resources in attempting to capture climate’s multidimensional character. In this brief introduction, I consider the contributions of the papers in the context of three areas of climate change scholarship: climate knowledge, ontologies of climate and the methodologies of climate change research. Taken as a whole, the collection suggests the value of a methodological and epistemological pluralism, one capable of registering the hybrid character of climate change and coping with the fact that multiple measurements, understandings and enactments of climate may be equally valid.