Extreme weather conditions, induced and intensified by a global climate emergency, increasingly impact communities across the world. In the face of climatic threats (including heatwaves, droughts, fires, and flooding) and its impacts across spatial scales - from the body to the neighborhood - designers and residents alike spend mounting energy and resources to reshape their surrounding built environments and protect lives and livelihoods against such extremes. In response to this unprecedented challenge, scholarship in the social sciences and design fields advance methodological approaches to understand, on the one hand, how individuals and societies learn to coexist with climate amidst uneven risks, vulnerabilities, and capacities, and, on the other, how new techniques and technologies can inform building practices better attuned to changing weather conditions on the ground. Yet, more work is needed to bridge these bodies of knowledge and examine how diverse methodologies can reveal situated lessons of being and becoming with climate to offer new insights for producing spaces able to cope with exacerbated yet uncertain climate futures.
This two-day hybrid symposium aims to address this gap by bringing together scholars working across the social sciences, humanities, and design to explore how diverse and creative methods can inform a more holistic understanding of preparing for and living with climate change. Specifically, and following disciplinary traditions in the fields of human geography, sociology, anthropology, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, the symposium will bring together scholars working methodologically at one or more intersections between body – space – weather to explore linkages across the experiential, material, and environmental dimensions of developing and inhabiting changing climates.
The symposium will be an opportunity for participants to receive feedback on manuscripts shared in advance of the event. Selected participants will be invited to submit contributions for a publication. If you would like to be considered for participation in this symposium, please fill out this form by Wednesday, October 15th, 2025.