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 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 goals of the symposium are two-fold. First, we aim to create a space for scholars interested in interdisciplinary and creative methods for studying climate change to learn from each other and advance their own work with the support of peers. Second, we aim to bring contributions from the symposium together in an edited volume and creative output to highlight the role of interdisciplinary and creative methods in advancing a more nuanced understanding of climate change and expand existing methodological tool-kits, with implications for design, community-based planning, and governance.