Affective ecologies: Braiding urban worlds in Darwin, Australia

Abstract

Emerging research on Anthropocene urbanism shows a commitment to human-nature centred futures and environmental justice but fails to engage with the language of race. Thinking the Anthropocene through race, however, has the potential to decolonise dominant apocalyptic narratives of climate change and provide insights into imaginaries of diverse urban futures. This paper argues that such futures run through entangled Indigenous and Ethnic minority worlds in white settler cities but are often explored separately. To entangle these worlds, I introduce and develop the concept of affective ecologies or sentient embodiments of ecological interdependency grounded in everyday urban life. The paper draws on in-depth interviews, focus groups, archival photographs as well as participatory photographs/video/films taken by racialised Indigenous peoples, ethnic minority migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Darwin, a tropical north Australian city. I braid stories of co-becomings with this Saltwater Country prone to anthropogenic climate change by focusing on two events – Loving Country and Listening to Old Man Rock. The findings provide new insights into urban cosmopolitics that calls for articulating, reassembling and co-composing plural modes of coexistence in the Anthropocene.