PhD Defence by Nora Söderberg
Categorisation of climate-related human mobility is a contested terrain. In project reports, online data dashboards, and at workshops dedicated to analysing ‘climate mobility’, data is presented without defining who is, and who is not a climate displaced person or a climate migrant. When definitions are offered, the labels and boundaries often differ between institutions—disagreements that have not hindered climate mobility from becoming the foci of multiple political declarations, regional policies and development projects. This exemplifies how ‘climate mobility’, despite being continuously contested, has emerged as an authoritative category in international politics. How are such contested categories legitimated across institutional boundaries?
Through a multi-sited, immersive analysis of the production of ‘climate mobility’ in Eastern Africa, this thesis develops a conceptualisation of categories as infrastructures in international politics and proposes a coherent methodology that follows these categories through their daily production and use. Grounded in Bourdieu’s theorisation of how authoritative knowledge is produced through social practices and drawing additional insights from Science and Technology Studies on the sedimentation of practices in socio-material structures, I analyse how the category of climate mobility is produced, formed and stabilised among international practitioners in Eastern Africa. The region, which includes the floodprone lowlands of South Sudan and the repeatedly drought-ridden Horn of Africa, is reported to be one of the regions most affected by climate-induced displacements and migration, globally. Within the region, Nairobi is emerging as a regional hub for knowledge production and initiatives on the topic. Approaching Nairobi as the starting point and as the primary research site, the thesis follows the category of climate mobility as it travels across disjunctive sites, engaging institutionally dispersed actors. The analysis, which is based on over 70 interviews and more than 60 hours of participant observation, as well as desk-based research, is presented in three parts.
First, I show how climate mobility is produced as an operational category through practices of mobilising and converting power resources between spheres of expertise. By following flows of funds, data and experts as they move within and between institutions, I develop a conceptualisation of infrastructural power as the capacity to order relations between people and things. Second, I analyse how the category of climate mobility is made recognisable to practitioners across institutions and spheres of expertise, despite continuous contestations around its meaning. Following the formation of the category through practices of calculation, visualisation and anticipation, I highlight its (in)visibilities and seductive promises across an online dashboard, an informal displacement camp, a regional situation room, and a series of community workshops. Based on this multi-sited ethnography, I develop a conceptualisation of infrastructural aesthetics, through which categories take on recognisable forms. Finally, I present ananalysis of the futurism engrained in climate mobility, which stabilises the authority of the category. By analysing practices of futuring—through forecasting, simulating and bounding—climate mobility, I develop a conceptualisation of infrastructural time, which captures the relational configurations of movement and stasis through which categories give rise to new flows and forms.
The research advances theoretical debates on the intersection between knowledge production and governance in International Relations and contributes new insights on the legitimation of expertise and data in a world characterised by climate change. Particularly, the thesis’ conceptualisation of categories as infrastructures highlights how classifications become authoritative not through official definitions but through their continuous (re)production in flows, forms and visions of the future.
Nora Söderberg is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute (EUI). Her research focuses on the role and legitimation of expertise in international politics, with a particular focus on climate governance and migration politics. She has also contributed to methodological developments in qualitative and interpretivist research. In her doctoral dissertation, she examined how a contested policy category has gained authority in international politics, based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with international and nongovernmental organisations in Kenya. Her previous research appears in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, Energy Research & Social Science, and Qualitative Research. Nora has also worked as a lecturer at Stanford University in Florence and Uppsala University and has held visiting research positions at the Stockholm Centre on Global Governance and Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology.
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