Die Veranstaltung findet statt im Rahmen des Studiengangs EMMIR ist aber für andere Studierende der Universität geöffnet. Für Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an

Outline
Climate change has been a vocabulary for over 30 years now. The scholarly body of literature and analysis of climate change embraces a broad variety of positions ranging from the depiction of climate change as a mere elaborate hoax (for example to win votes) to arguments like if it is happening than it is not anthropogenic but connected to/caused by natural geological transformations that have occurred on this planet coming to estimations with very high numbers of affected people.
In migration studies concepts of climate-induced migration are currently less concerned with the question regarding the existence of climate change but rather with the people’s causes and motivations to move and in how far it can be defined as an effect of climate change, whether this movement is temporary or permanent and if those refugees stay within one country or move across international borders in the context of climate change.
In this regard, climate change and migration seem to look like cause and effect. But there is more complexity to it: while developments of global climate and its effects have numerous feedback effects; causes, motivations and possibilities of migration are not separable and might have more levels of interference.
The destruction of Earth as an inhabitable planet is a filmic subject at least since the 1970’s (e.g. Trumbull’s “Silent Running”); a decade ago Roland Emmerich anticipated the irreversibility of Climate change (“The Day After Tomorrow”)—interestingly enough only a small but extremely mobile part of humanity escapes extinction in his dystopia. Over the past decade also a number of documentary films took up the issue in order to raise awareness for the phenomenon and its effects. For this film series we will screen and discuss eight films that this way or the other deal with the debate around climate change. All films—implicitly or explicitly—are also concerned with the societal challenges and effects of climate change, including the movement of people.

Suggested readings

• Bettini, Giovanni (2013) Climate Parbarians at the Gate? A critique of apocalyptic narratives on ‘climate refugees’. Geoforum 45 (2013) pp 63-72.
• Gemenne, Francois (2015) One good reason to speak of ‘climate refugees’. Forced Migration Review 49 pp 70-71.
• Kelly, Elaine (2013) A Rough Climate for Migration. alternate routes 23 (2012) pp 59-84.
• Martin, Susan (2015) The state of the evidence. Forced Migration Review 49 pp 12-13.