PREDICTING AND EXPERIMENTING IN CLIMATE MIGRATION FORECASTING MODELS
Loading...
Date
2024-12-19
Authors
Modi, Dhruv
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
In this thesis, I pay close attention to the scientific literature to understand how knowledge is being synthesized in nine different forecasts of climate change induced human migration. I do so in keeping with Aykut et al.’s (2019) suggestion that performativity in model based predictions must be understood as belonging to a pluralized terrain of practices of anticipatory expertise which have become integral to policy making and governance. Thus, I situate the extant and most updated models forecasting climate migration in the context of the development of climate migration research as a highly methodologically dispersed and historically contested field of inquiry. I note that this context has led to wide agreement between critics of the ‘dominant quest for numbers’ (Cord and Methmann. 2012) and practitioners alike that socioeconomic phenomena like climate migration are far too aleatory and uncertain to accurately predict, especially for planning purposes. Within this formation, I consider how the tendency of competition in the sciences which might lead researchers to try to impose finality runs up against a limit imposed by the fundamental intractability of predicting future human migration. I theorize that a contradiction arises from the interaction between the performativity of scientific research trying to position itself as ‘policy relevant’ and the ‘difficulty of reality’ posed above which has led researchers to adopt a reflexive reflex in their own research in order to maintain their epistemic innocence. I explore how this reflexivity is enacted in a shift away from simulation as a predictive practice towards a more open form of active experimentation of the diverse drivers of climate-change induced migration which has yielded a different (and in my opinion rehabilitated) functional relationship between what this research is attempting to do and what it is actually achieving. I conclude by speculating on how the virtuality of these experiments engenders a certain freedom of exchange and imagination allowing for a scientific register that may actively resist the forms of ‘foreclosure on the future’ (Hulme. 2011) which some critics of reductive anticipatory practices are rightly anxious about.
Description
Keywords
Climate Migration, Forecasting Migration, Science and Technology Studies, Science Studies, Simulation