Bodies and climate : transcorporeal affects of weathering
13 November 2026,
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Research day organised by EMMA and the FORESEE project
Organising team :
Pauline Amy de la Bretèque (Nîmes Université), Jean-Michel Ganteau (UPVM), Marie Mianowski (Université Grenoble Alpes), Valérie Morisson (UPVM), Claire Omhovère (UPVM), Constance Pompié (UPVM).
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This research day is part of a broader research projet on climate change and the way it may foster creative co-acclimatisation. In an article published in 2014, Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker[1] harnessed climate change to bodies arguing that « [t]o bring climate change home, in this context, entails reconfiguring our spatial and temporal relations to the weather-world and cultivating an imaginary where our bodies are makers, transfer points, and sensors of the ‘climate change’ from which we might otherwise feel too distant, or that may seem to us too abstract to get a bodily grip on. » They propose that climate and weather are not backdrops to our human existences but « of us, in us, through us. » Their understanding of climate change is indebted to Stacey Alaimo’s transcorporeal connection between ‘nature’ and human bodies[2]. In its common usage, weathering –being altered or worn due to exposure to weather conditions –does not apply to human beings but to materials. However, Neimanis and Loewen Walker encourage us to extend weathering to living organisms, human and more-than-human oragnisms : « Weathering, then, is a logic, a way of being/becoming, or a mode of affecting and differentiating that brings humans into relation with more-than-human weather. »
Obviously not all bodies are exposed to climate change in the same way and not all bodies may adapt to weathering. Situated analyses and imaginaries allow for a deeper understanding of human responsibilities and response-abilities.
This research day aims at investigating how transcorporeal weathering is evoked, imagined, respresented in literature, the visual arts, the cinema and the performative arts. Tempests, storms, floods as well as droughts have long captured human imagination. The apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic imaginaries have been fuelled by real disasters and an increasing awareness of our entangled vulnerabilities. The possibility of a new sublime triggered by the unimaginable scale of pollution, depletion, meltdown, extinctions has been debated. Emily Brady has showed how a humbling sublime may emerge from new human and non-human relationalities.[3]
We invite participants to explore the following topics in literature and the arts :
- the intersection of local and global perceptions, narratives and imaginaries ;
- the condition of strandedness : distress /resilience/adaptation ;
- the impact of extreme weather upon bodies, and upon spatial and social configurations ;
- perceptions and descriptions of uncommon heat or cold : the emergence of lexical clusters related to climate change ;
- climate-related diseases, health or mental problems ;
- coping mechanisms and attempts at adapting to weather changes ;
- new forms of the sublime surfacing in works revisiting the deluge or droughts ;
- the development of elemental eco-criticism ;
- the form of climate-fiction and post-apocalyptic sublime ;
- the effect of climate change upon the non-human world ;
- the mechanisms of empathy and solidarity in the face of climate change ;
- the interplay of responsibilities and respons-abilities.
We also aim to investigate the capacity of literature and the arts to simulate new weather conditions through immersive aesthetics and, therefore, to raise awareness of changes, encourage adaptation strategies, and reappropriate a common future.
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Please send a 300-word abstract and a 50-word bio to Valérie Morisson (valerie.morisson@univ-montp3.fr) by April 15th for consideration.
Note that the travel expenses will not be covered by EMMA.
[1] Neimanis, Astrida, And Rachel Loewen Walker. “‘Weathering’: Climate Change And The ‘Thick Time’ Of Transcorporeality.” Hypatia, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2014, Pp. 558–75. Jstor, Http://Www.Jstor.Org/Stable/24542017. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
[2] Alaimo, S. (2008). Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature. In S. Alaimo, & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material Feminisms (pp. 237-264). Indiana University Press.
[3] Brady, Emily. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature.
Cambridge University Press, 2013.