Description
Narrative inquiries provide us a way into the complexity of climate change: by interrogating existing and telling new stories, we are able to hold open simultaneously a range of interpretations, perspectives, temporalities and also unexplored possibilities. Drawing on insights from posthuman and postcolonial intersectionality, as articulated by ecofeminist and new feminist political ecologies researchers, this paper interrogates the stories and tropes of the COVID-19 pandemic and their links to and relevance for discourses of climate change vulnerability. Both the pandemic and climate change are analyzed as storied events filled with tropes of heroes (in particular white rationalist saviors), villains (especially racialized Others), and victims. It is argued that these stories are shaped by processes of dualistic constructions or, in the words of Val Plumwood, ‘master practices’ (namely backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorporation, objectification, and homogenisation or stereotyping) which construct certain human and non-human beings as vulnerable and deserving of resources of safety, and frame others as villains along colonial tropes of animality.
Building on this analysis, this paper argues that interrogating these stories allows us, on the one hand, to repolitize vulnerability by linking local, context-specific questions of who is constructed as vulnerable, when, and why to global and historical tapestries of power relations. This can be achieved by drawing on feminist intersectional research and focusing on power relations causing marginalization; interrogating underlying norms and governing institutions shaping the narrative; questioning the underlying assumptions and dominant knowledges inscribed into the stories; and resisting any form of essentialism by taking seriously the agency of human and nonhuman beings framed as vulnerable. On the other hand, such an interrogation can create the basis for new stories that focus on addressing and ending historical systems of oppressions and facilitate broad alliances for political action and solidarity based on common interests.
