Dialogues in Human Geography

Just as global institutions and environmental assessment processes embark on the latest effort to integrate more social science into global environmental change research, it appears that the social sciences of climate change are unable or unwilling to address this challenge. In this article, I explore the nature of these dynamics within human geography and argue that climate change occupies a curiously ambiguous position within our discipline of both an explicit presence and an underlying absence. Framed predominantly in terms of a biophysical challenge requiring some form of social response, work on climate change retains an assumed socio-nature divide – a position which has yet to be substantively challenged by the different strands of political ecology, new materialism and environmental humanities that now pervade the discipline. To advance new geographies of climate change, the article argues that our understanding of climate change needs to shift from that of a problem that needs specific responses to a condition that is constituted through specific forms of socio-spatial relation and in turn constitutes the politics, ethics and meaning of particular socio-spatial orderings, from the citizen to the city, the community to the corporation.

While agreeing with the major tenets of Harriet Bulkeley’s timely and powerful argument for geographers (and social scientists more generally) to engage with climate change, this response raises three provocative challenges that arise from this intervention: the degree to which the epistemological and theoretical bases to these arguments are radical, the nature of the engagement problem in the discipline and, perhaps most importantly, how these arguments can be translated to a ‘progressive politics’. The response argues that there is much further to go in explaining the utility of socio-natural understanding of climate change if those beyond the social sciences and in the wider realm of policy and politics are to be convinced of the power of the approach being advocated. It also argues that geographers are well-positioned to develop the bolder and more interdisciplinary approach needed to achieve the kind of ambitious shift in thinking Bulkeley seeks.

Harriet Bulkeley identifies a persistent, and misconceived, framing of climate change as a ‘society–nature problem’ (Bulkeley H (2019). Navigating climate's human geographies: exploring the whereabouts of climate politics. Dialogues in Human Geography 9(1): 3–17). While I concur with her diagnosis, her implied cure begins with geographers volunteering to change their intellectual habits by responding to ‘good arguments’. I challenge this cognitivism and ask what sorts of material frameworks for inquiry will engender an embrace of the idea of ‘climate as condition’.

This short commentary explores two absences in Bulkeley’s (2019) human geographies of climate change. First, the absence of other environment problems, signifying how in the debate about climate change our response often acts to crowd out other problems. Second, in considering the temporal boundaries of climate’s human geographies, the absence of the future, which is increasingly being brought into being by scenarios, visualizations and creative works.

This commentary seeks to extend and interrogate the notion of ‘climate-as-condition’ deployed in Bulkeley’s paper. It does so by proposing that we complement the focus on how climate change is currently being made and remade, rather than appearing as a problem to which we respond, with an interrogation of the historical production of climate change by particular social forces and processes. In doing this, it seeks another way to insist on the centrality of the social sciences in understanding climate change. But it also suggests that the sorts of vignettes that Bulkeley develops may be understood differently if they are situated historically.

Harriet Bulkeley’s article raises some of the persistent challenges of integrating social science perspectives into climate change research. In this commentary, we consider a broader and deeper approach to integration that introduces multiple entry points for engaging with climate change research, education, and training. We argue that an integrative discourse is already emerging and discuss the potential role and implications for human geography.

In this reflection, I take up a variety of open questions and remaining concerns raised by the set of commentaries concerning the implications of the paper for: how we regard climate change as an issue; how knowledge systems might be changed to enable more diverse ways of knowing climate change to take root; and for its politics.

Engaging the ‘Geographies of Dissociation’ in the spirit of constructive dialogue and debate, this commentary recognizes its contributions and raises issues and questions relating to the potential and perils of pluralism, value, the material and the symbolic, and uneven geographical development and its politics. Building on the claim that pluralism needs to be a means to greater explanation and understanding rather than an end in and of itself, it argues for a more balanced culturally and politically grounded economic geography.

In their discussion of ‘dissociation’, Ibert et al. ((2019) Geographies of dissociation: value creation, ‘dark’ places, and ‘missing’ links. Dialogues in Human Geography.) explore the negative side of branding—that is, the efforts companies take to avoid being identified with problems such as labor exploitation or environmental degradation. Because the introduction of unwanted associations into the semiotic circuit threatens the value of brands, brand owners engage in both proactive and reactive relational work to insulate brand assets from such threats. In this commentary, I explore the development of supply chain corporate social responsibility through the lens of dissociations. Civil society organizations, such as trade unions, student groups, faith-based organizations, and so on, that target brands by highlighting problems in their supply chains are engaged in a struggle over value. One way that brand owners try to counter this reputational threat is by accepting, albeit to varying degrees, the principle that they are responsible for maintaining labor or environmental standards along the supply chain. I ask whether this development signals a shift in the terrain of struggle between brands and their critics, and what such a shift might imply about the limits of dissociation as a corporate practice.

In the spirit of Ibert et al.’s ‘Geographies of Dissociation: Value Creation, “Dark” Places, and “Missing” Links’, we briefly suggest several ways in which ‘Geographies of Dissociation’ itself elides certain crucial issues in the cultural economies of value. The first relates to the need to develop more fully and concretely the relational spatialities of globally networked production. The second follows from this by suggesting that, in order to consolidate its argument of lacunae and elisions, the article overlooks or downplays crucial elements in the work of global value chain research, cultural studies and broader cultural-economic geography, and value theory that have—in their own ways—developed complex analyses of the spatial articulations of governance, ownership, branding, and the production of value. We conclude by returning to Marx’s value theory of labor (not to be confused with Ricardian labor theory of value) to suggest that a more direct question about what drives systems of cultural valuation in the context of networked production might enable the authors to advance the development of a dissociative geography.

‘Helping’ distant others through ‘Brand Aid’ humanitarianism may be one of the most successful dissociational branding practices of all. In this short commentary, I argue that humanitarian ‘helping’ itself can become a branded commodity, as understood by Ibert et al. (2019). I draw on the dissociational framework to reconsider the concept of ‘brand aid’ as a link between ethical consumption, international development, and the commodification of humanitarianism. In brand aid, the ‘ethical’ action proposed by a consumption choice triggers the ‘helping’ of distant and disengaged Others. This results in reshaping the real or imagined ethical obligations across networks of solidarity, where dissociational symbolic value moves from consumption back to production and is deflected onto suffering Others. In these chains of value, the conditions of production become eclipsed by the halo of helping through consumption. Ethical consumption is becoming less possible, humanitarianism is increasingly commodified, and ‘partnerships’ meant to alleviate global suffering are becoming more complicated than ever before. Cultural economic geography can deepen our knowledge of how maintaining inequalities can produce surplus value through ‘helping’, and how this is embedded in strategic and habitual forms of dissociation from global ills.

Ibert et al.’s (2019) article is a welcome stimulus to, and a refocusing on, what seem to us to be reasonably well-established problematics and debates. Its arguments seem familiar to us because of our work, since 2011, on the followthethings.com project. From this perspective, their remit for new cultural–economic geography research doesn’t seem cultural enough (what about cultural geography’s recent ‘turn’ towards creative practice?), the publications drawn upon seem unnecessarily traditional (what about geography’s ongoing ‘turn’ towards digital practice and ‘natively digital’ outputs?), and the research practices needed for the work that is outlined seem undeveloped (what can we learn about capitalism’s ‘dark’ places and strategies of association and dissociation from, among others, creative digital practice?). Digital outputs such as followthethings.com risk being bypassed by more traditional practices of academic review, and our insistence that it should ‘stand on its own’ without accompanying academic papers doesn’t, admittedly, help. So, in this response, we have chosen to engage with the anchor article’s main themes and arguments by sketching out our parallel world of ongoing research in which strategies and vocabularies of dissociation feature strongly. What we conclude is that both of our projects could be seen to be working towards the same goal: to assemble a new vocabulary that is better suited for the analysis of this area of cultural–economic geography. We’d like to collaborate on this with Ibert et al. ((2019) Geographies of dissociation: value creation, ‘dark’ places, and ‘missing’ links. Dialogues in Human Geography.) and anyone else who’s interested.

Inspired by five commentaries on our forum article, in this response article we elaborate on three points related to geographies of dissociation, namely positioning dissociation, dealing with plurality and moving from agenda-setting to empirical research. In order to assess the validity of critique elaborated in the commentaries, we specify the contribution we seek to make. Geographies of dissociation aim to contribute to a strand of cultural economic geography that has become increasingly interested in the social construction of symbolic value but that still lacks a conceptual vocabulary for addressing the loopholes and missing links in these relational webs and their related geographies. We explain how geographies of dissociation build on pluralism without ignoring epistemological frictions. Furthermore, we discuss how geographies of dissociation might inspire political economic approaches and future empirical research.