Bodily Learning for a (Climate) Changing World: Registering Differences through Performative and Collective Research

Jenny Cameron

There is widespread agreement that current climate change scenarios mean we have to change how we live on this planet. Yet our current understandings of social and behavioural change seem insufficient for the task at hand. In this paper we explore Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘learning to be affected’, and we argue that this idea of bodily learning seems well-suited to thinking about how people can be moved to act in response to the human and nonhuman world that is all around us. We also argue that research can prompt and sharpen this form of embodied learning when it is conducted in a performative and collective mode that is geared towards crafting rather than capturing realities. We demonstrate how this might occur through the example of a community garden research project based on a collective bus trip-workshop method

Suggested citation

Cameron, J. (with Craig Manhood and Jamie Pomfrett), 2011. ‘Bodily Learning for a (Climate) Changing World: Registering Differences through Performative and Collective Research’, Local Environment, 16(6), 493-508.