Absence revisited. In search of climate-related human mobility across time and space: What’s missing?

The paper re-examines the concept of absence by building on our longstanding research interest in the linguistic and discursive representations of human mobility in the context of anthropogenic climate change (AUTHORS, 2017, 2022). It draws on research into discursive absence as discussed by Partington (2014), Duguid and Partington (2018), Schröter and Taylor (2018), Taylor (2012), in order to provide some discussion about the methodological and interpretative challenges these absences may prompt within this particular context. While as early as 2011, the UK Foresight Report was highlighting vulnerabilities due to the impact of environmental change and the potential inability of “trapped” populations to move (2011: 9), our recent research suggests that there is little mention of the fact that some people do not, or cannot, move. Given the importance of this topic, one would expect it to be present in climate change and migration discourse in the media. While most studies have tended to focus on migration as an adaptation strategy, research into why some people do not move has also received scant attention (but see Zickgraf, 2019; Ayeb-Karlsson et al., 2018). It is our contention that the study of im/mobility may provide fertile ground to further explore the issue of absence/presence on different levels in spite of its complexity, not least because immobility is the lack (or absence) of mobility itself. In order to answer our research question, we adopt a two-branched approach to trace dominant and absent discourses by comparing two diachronic specialized corpora from two different genres: news articles and COP speeches.