Moved by care: Acting on entanglements of climate change, health, and mobilities


Stephanie Sodero, University of Manchester

As climate change impacts grow increasingly apparent, so too do adverse physical and mental health impacts for humans and animals. Fast-onset events, like heat waves and hurricanes, and slow-onset events, like saltwater infiltration and zoonotic disease transmission, impact the health and biodiversity of communities globally as well as threaten healthcare infrastructure and service provision. Many health mobilities, from transnational medical supply chains to local homecare to veterinary care, are powered by fossil fuels which endanger climatic stability and, in turn, set in motion greater health impacts. Situated at the intersection of climate change, health, and mobilities, this paper is grounded in a feminist ethic of care centering relationships with each other and the environment. I argue that care is a productive and imperative emotion through which to consider entanglements of climate change, health, and mobilities. Care is an impetus for health mobilities: “care underlies, effects, and contours the mobility practices of people – in other words, people are moved by care” (Balcom Raleigh, Kirveennummi, and Puustinen, 2020: 54, emphasis added). Underpinning many care practices are mobility patterns premised on infrastructure and pricing that privilege fossil fuels, demonstrating inconsistent, undermining, and damaging social practices. Consideration of care ranges from conventional realms, patients and health professionals, to less conventional contexts: supply chains, other species, and the climate. Take as an example the more-than-human in the context of climate change and mobility. From botanical decolonisation (Mastnak et al., 2014), to parasites and disease (Southern and Dillon, 2022), to orcas swimming alongside humans cycling on shore (Scott, 2020), these diverse social-ecological relations are transferable to rethinking contemporary assemblages, infrastructures, and logistics of health-related mobilities, namely by recognising unexpected, pervasive, and reciprocal relationships (Gumbs, 2020), infusing care and climate considerations into healthcare delivery. Informed by Bennett’s (2010) vibrant materiality, Fishel (2017) uses the human body, and the microbes and bacteria therein, as an entry point for fostering a global politics based on commonality rather than division, positioning the human body as a “lively vessel” subject to diverse flows. This corporeal grounding challenges paradigms centred on individuality and isolation to create a material basis for cooperation, and by extension I argue, care. Exploring the relationship between external societal circulations and internal bodily circulations with a focus on mobilities imperative for health and life brings a multi-scalar, material, and more-than-human lens to the provision of health services. To this end, I privilege “entanglement and care” (Fishel, 2019: 351). to explore the relationship between climate change, health, and mobilities and to think through applied reorientations to healtcare.

This paper will be presented at the following session: