How do we sense climate change in everyday life?

Scientific ways of knowing climate change are valuable, but technically abstract and impersonal. Their dominant presence in climate narratives reflects a deleterious absence: they have overridden lived experience and the body’s validation of everyday changes taking place.

What is missing is an intimate way of living with-and-through the many rapid changes taking place. In the below practice-based PhD research, Citt Williams and colleague Jarramali Kulka investigate climate beyond how it is read to how it feels. Across a series of episodes, they formulate a documentary practice that communicates a climate sensitivity more intimate in approach.

 

Intimate sensing is a breath of scented air, a seasonal squelch of mud between the toes. It complicates the view of remote-sensing and rouses the body to know and feel climate change in everyday life.