The escalating climate crisis is a global social problem requiring multidisciplinary and multi-institutional coordination to solve. In recent years, health practitioners and institutions have become increasingly involved in the climate crisis, recognizing that climate change poses a serious public health threat across a range of health issues. This dissertation draws on diverse sociological fields, including the sociology of the future and the sociology of emotions, in order to examine how health practitioners and climate scientists prepare for the future of the climate crisis and its impacts on public health. Using a qualitative research design involving primary document analysis, interviews, and event ethnography at multiple climate and health professional conferences, I examine how climate change is conceptualized through the scientific imagination, as well as the cultural imagination, in order to construct different possible future scenarios. These scenarios are used in order to leverage feelings of hope and dread by emphasizing the ability to save lives through significant climate action. However, I also show that the focus on the future often elides the present-day health impacts of climate change, creating what I call temporal inequality between vulnerable and marginalized populations who experience the post-apocalyptic future envisioned by scientists and activists, and privileged populations who have the resources to offset that future.

Creator

• Fallin, Mallory

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-y12e-cm89

Subject

• Sociology
• Environmental studies
• Public health

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_937014
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16307

Keyword

• sociology of the future
• climate change
• sociology of emotions
• hope
• temporal inequality
• despair

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright