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Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

2.4K followers 1K following 370 posts

Lecturer in Environmental Politics
Climate politics - vulnerability - islands
Social media editor for @environmentalpol.bsky.social
Convener of @bisa-ecpwg.bsky.social
Views are mine and represent me

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Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Re-reading The Kraken Wakes on holiday. It's always felt like the climate change analogy out of Wyndham's stories. Here's a paragraph for the Europeans coming back from COP.

With apologies, I can't get this copied out on my phone. The paragraph relates to the narrator returning from witnessing attacks in the Caribbean and feeling affected but safe in the real world of the UK, where these things can't happen. Unlike the tropics, where "freakish" things often happen. This sense of false safety is a theme through the book.

November 22, 2025 at 11:31 PM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Swam in Otago Harbour. More picturesque than it sounds.

Mac bay, beach, blue water looking warmer than it is.

Me in the water, but you'll have to take my word for it.

November 20, 2025 at 3:46 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Went on an adventure with my sister. Spent hours on a boat and didn't throw up. Saw the most incredible sights... Impossible to capture on camera of course.

cascading waterfalls of Milford Sound on a rainy day

November 19, 2025 at 4:33 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Submissions invited for #POLLEN2026 for the panel: Colonial histories and climate futures: critical perspectives on vulnerability.

We are particularly interested in papers that draw together themes of climate-induced im/mobilities & vulnerabilisation.

nomadit.co.uk/conference/p...

Description
This panel brings together theoretical approaches and case studies at the intersection of climate change, human (im)mobility and vulnerability. We aim to critically discuss how colonial and neocolonial systems contribute to geographic, economic, and social inequalities in the context of increasing climate change impacts, thereby making a contribution to both climate justice and political ecology debates. We invite papers which critically examine dominant discourses that ascribe vulnerability to so-called “at-risk” populations and explore alternative epistemologies of survival, resistance and political agency. We are particularly interested in papers that draw together two themes: Climate-induced (im)mobilities, and vulnerabilisation.

October 15, 2025 at 7:17 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

On Monday I'm presenting virtually at the Adaptation Futures conference, on the 'Beyond Adaptation: Loss and Damage and Justice' panel. 8am BST / 8pm NZT.

My paper is titled 'Narrating climate un/futures through Loss and Damage and Reparations'. It'll be the first time I present on this new area.

breakdown of the panel, other panellists are Luka Hamel-Serenity, Alicia N'Guetta, Emily Boyd, and Lydia Pedoth.

October 10, 2025 at 6:35 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

OH. And I'm presenting at Adaptation Futures on Monday 13th October (virtually). I hoped to have developed a paper by now (lol) but instead it's going to be quite speculative...

Title: Narrating climate un/futures through Loss and Damage and reparations.

Introduction

This paper will draw on a new research project that uses storytelling and narrative techniques to disentangle the conceptualisation and political implications of Loss and Damage (L&D) and reparations. These concepts are rising in importance in climate politics but whilst L&D has become part of the official UNFCCC process, reparations has been excluded. This is because L&D is a specific and bounded climate concept, whilst reparations claims hold broader historical implications that many states are eager to avoid. However, the obvious entanglement of the two creates a space of contestation that this project identifies as a key moment in the narration of climate un/futures.
The Pacific is an important site for understanding and exploring these ideas. Pacific actors have been central in pushing the L&D conversation, and they also use the concept in a way that draws on reparations narratives, as part of ongoing efforts to contextualise climate change alongside other forms of colonial violence, in particular nuclear testing and ruinous extractivism (Maurer 2024; Teaiwa 2014). This project builds on work that explores different socio-climatic imaginaries, viewing climate politics as a site of contested futures (Death 2022). This work identifies how dominant climate politics reproduces coloniality, and finds alternative futures in the counternarratives and storytelling of places that have already experience the ending of their worlds, and have a history of anticolonial resistance (Mitchell and Chaudhury 2020; Maurer 2024). This is important in the Pacific as its islands are usually assumed to be doomed to uninhabitability (Weatherill 2023) whereas both L&D and reparations are concepts which suggest a future of survival and change.

October 9, 2025 at 8:16 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Call for papers for POLLEN which has just been released, for a panel I'm organising with Alina Kaltenberg.

Colonial histories and climate futures: critical perspectives on vulnerability.

This panel brings together theoretical approaches and case studies at the intersection of climate change, human (im)mobility and vulnerability. We aim to critically discuss how colonial and neocolonial systems contribute to geographic, economic, and social inequalities in the context of increasing climate change impacts, thereby making a contribution to both climate justice and political ecology debates. We invite papers which critically examine dominant discourses that ascribe vulnerability to so-called “at-risk” populations and explore alternative epistemologies of survival, resistance and political agency. We are particularly interested in papers that draw together two themes: Climate-induced (im)mobilities, and vulnerabilisation.

The process of identifying “the vulnerable” as an inherently fragile population in the Global South neglects the historical economic path-dependencies and power-asymmetries that created vulnerabilities in the first place. Instead, vulnerability should be understood as the “imaginative line drawn to separate what and who is expected to be in danger, and what and who is expected to be safe” (Weatherill 2023 p.12), thereby enforcing “politics of disposability” (p.12). Furthermore, Farbotko et al. (2023) argue that unequal colonial structures render some places “inevitably uninhabitable”, thus legitimizing the abandonment of some territories, while others continue to be seen as habitable in the context of climate change.

The process of vulnerabilisation is therefore particularly relevant for the issue of climate-induced displacement. Who has to (be) move(d) and who gets to stay in the face of increasing climate impacts is deeply hierarchical and embedded in (neo)colonial inequalities.

This panel asks:

• What changes about climate politics if vulnerability is understood as a constituted process, rather than a natural condition?

• What potential does resistance hold to change this conversation?

We use climate-induced displacement as an …

October 9, 2025 at 8:05 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Call for papers for BISA:

Call for exploring the relationship between imperialism, coloniality, and environmental degradation

Call for Gender and resistance in environmental politics

October 9, 2025 at 8:05 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Another Call for Papers for #BISA2026 (3rd-5th June, Brighton), this time for a panel I'm organising with @tom-cb.bsky.social. Deadline 24th Oct.

Gender and resistance in environmental politics: This panel will explore how gender relates to resistance against env harm AND resistance to transition.

We are putting out this Call for Papers for BISA2026 in search of people who are researching the connection between gender and resistance in the field of environmental politics.
This call comes at a time of (at least) two forms of gendered resistance:
1. Growing resistance to measures that combat climate change and environmental destruction, a form of resistance that is often masculinised
2. Ongoing resistance against environmental destruction, a form of resistance that is both discursively constructed as feminine and that manifests as a form of burden that is often borne by women and other marginalised peoples
Against a backdrop of the target of 1.5 degrees warming looking increasingly unlikely, and a ‘green’ transition currently reliant on new geographies of environmental and human harm and exploitation, any meaningful progress towards global environmental targets is stalling. Resistance to these forms of harm and efforts to transition away from fossil fuels are at a critical juncture. At the same time, there is a surging right-wing politics globally, part of which acts as a defence of industry and environmental harm. This form of resistance is directed at transition itself.
We invite papers which explore the intersections of gender and resistance in relation to environment or climate politics. Approaches might include ecofeminism, political ecology, and feminist political economy.
Some papers which participants might engage with:
• Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and authoritarian desire (Daggett, 2018)
• Feminist approaches to environmental politics (Lawrence et al, 2025)
• ‘Gender and climate change’: from impacts to discourses (MacGregor, 2010)
• Colonial erasures in gender and climate change solutions (Resurrección, 2024)
Please send your 200 word abstracts to t.n.brookes@keele.ac.uk and weatherillck@outlook.com by 24th October along with your name, affiliation, career stage and geographical location.

October 9, 2025 at 6:47 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Yesterday in the US, three children were shot at one school.

At least 72 Palestinians were killed in airstrikes.

A random youtuber who defended both of these horrors is the one being eulogised by world leaders.

Charlie Kirk says gun deaths 'unfortunately' worth it to keep 2nd amendment

Charlie Kirk tweet screenshot: the deaths of women and children in gaza are the fault of Hamas not Israel, just like the deaths in Japan during WW2 were the fault of Japan not America (sic). When a government engages in unprovoked, murderous aggression, they are to blame for everything that results

September 11, 2025 at 7:51 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Day 2 of Accountable Adaptation. Today I get to just listen.

new UCL building, with a large window that says Palestinian Childhoods Exhibition

Giant dangling globe inside the building

September 10, 2025 at 8:55 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Slept in a portakabin opposite the Abba arena. #London

September 10, 2025 at 7:29 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Volunteers from the US and Europe volunteer so they can murder. They're not ashamed and they don't deny it.

Every day I read /see something that fills me with sick despair that our government not only supports this, but has criminalised protest against it.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

After Salem was shot, his father, Montasser, 51, rushed to the site, and tried to collect his sons’ bodies for burial, but was also fatally injured by a sniper.

The need for a dignified funeral for loved ones is a core human instinct, protected in law and explored in art for millennia. It is at the emotional heart of Homer’s Iliad, one of the earliest surviving works of literature.

But on that day, Raab treated love and grief as cause to kill. “They just kept on coming to try and take these bodies,” he said.

The video of Salem’s killing, and footage of other attacks on unarmed Palestinians, was posted online five months after his death, part of a montage made by a soldier called Shalom Gilbert to celebrate a deployment in Gaza.

September 10, 2025 at 4:25 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

On my way to an Accountable Adaptation workshop at UCL. Going to be talking about vulnerability, you might not be surprised to hear.

Train station platform with a bright moon and early morning sky

September 9, 2025 at 5:07 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Had an amazing few days in Scotland, including a big walk yesterday. Don't want to turn back into an indoor person.

Me showing early signs of turning very red indeed. Oops. In my defence, it was cloudy...

July 11, 2025 at 4:49 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

Yesterday was 146 miles, 10 hours, 4 trains, 2 buses. But now I'm here.

a landscape photo, dry stone wall in the foreground, then rolling hills to dark shadows in the distance

Similar photo, but this time a small loch is visible in the distance

July 9, 2025 at 9:24 AM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

The village I am from, taken from the train as I head north. Nottingham is bone dry so I'm loving the green.

Warton crag in the distance, behind a long, lush green field.

July 8, 2025 at 12:16 PM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

A gannet flew alongside us for a while.

June 21, 2025 at 1:20 PM

Charlotte Weatherill

@ckweatherill.bsky.social

I went to a panel or roundtable in every slot at #BISA2025. No break, full blooded. Some highlights for me were the Brink event, the War and Nature series, and the final session with Laura Horn and John Barry. Just an honour and a joy to be on a panel with these two excellent people.