Becoming Weather: Weather, Embodiment and Affect

Following a relational, Indigenous-led approach grounded in 25 years of collaborative work, this book looks to weather and climate, tracing the embodied, emplaced and affective ways weather co-constitutes people, place and time/s raising critical questions of ethics, politics and becoming.

Becoming weather leads the reader through a reflexive engagement with weather, seeking to shed light on pressing issues around climate change and its entanglements: from the body where contours of weather are intimately felt and known, to the ways that agencies of weather are implicated in the construction of nations, to global topologies of climate (in)justice. Reflecting on deep and ongoing collaborative work undertaken with Indigenous-led research collectives in Australia and the Philippines, the book traces contours of response-ability, learning from weathery relationships to speak back to constructions of climate that see it as aer nullius, belonging to no-one, and that deny ongoing responsibilities, becomings and belongings. The book aims to support more-than-human and relational understandings of weather that situate us all within an ethics of differential cobecoming and that demand attention to the connections that bind and co-constitute.

The book is intended for those interested in thinking differently about weather and climate, particularly those who feel an urgent dissatisfaction with mainstream responses and understandings. It will be beneficial for those who would learn from weather, from and with place, in ways led by Indigenous scholars and their allies though an engaged, reflexive, more-than-human and ethnographic account. It does not shy away from critical engagement, nor the changes desperately needed to learn and unlearn, to attend to positionalities and responsibilities, and to engage with what it means to weather on unceded Indigenous land.

Sarah Wright is Professor and Future Fellow in Geography and Development Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She works in critical development studies, with a focus on geographies of weather, and Indigenous and postcolonial geographies. She is part of two Indigenous-led research collectives in Australia, the Bawaka Collective and Yandaarra, and has worked with Filipino social movements for 25 years. She lives with her family on Gumbaynggirr Country on the mid-north coast NSW in Australia. Her collaborative writing has won several awards including the NSW Premier’s History Awards (2022, with Yandaarra) and the Prime Minister’s Literary award for non-fiction (2020, with the Bawaka Collective as Gay’wu Group of Women) and been shortlisted for the Chief Minister’s NT Book Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (2020, with the Bawaka Collective as Gay’wu Group of Women) and the National Book Award of the Philippines (2019 with Diosa Labiste).