From Grounded to Anchored Politics: Refiguring Permanence in California

This project investigates the politics of climate adaptation in California. As rising seas and increasingly frequent wildfires threaten the permanence of the built environment - the infrastructure that facilitates politics as grand as monuments to power, law and order and as granular as the basic needs daily life: food, shelter, running water, privacy - it looks to how, faced with such ecological impermanence certain communities are clinging to permanence, while others, in plural ways, are refiguring what they understand and appreciate as permanence. Navigating this tension between permanence and impermanence, this project develops a novel ecological reading of Walter Benjamin's political philosophy. Benjamin's insights on the relationship between violence and permanence provide a deeper perspective on the impasses and anxieties which grip adaptation politics. Building on recent scholarship, on how Benjamin imagines recovering justice in the dispensation of permanence, this project enlivens his ideas in concrete contexts. As adaptation politics in the state shift towards a politics of impermanence, this project asks, might uncertainty uplift justice?