This project explores intersections between personal, practical and political perspectives on societal transformations to address climate change and attain global sustainable development goals, as well as explorations of lived experiences of climate changes and their implications for people’s lives and health. The project will have its empirical focus on Pacific Island states, and focuses on research questions related to experienced health, risk, security and justice. The project brings together perspectives that so far rarely have been combined: phenomenological philosophy that allows for examinations of embodied subjectivity and lived experiences, sense-making analysis of coping strategies and practices for instigating change, and political economy analysis of how income, wealth, and both material and non-material resources are distributed.

Participants in the project are Stephen Woroniecki, LiU, Seed Box Postdoc; Björn-Ola Linnér, LiU affiliated researcher, Victoria Wibeck, LiU, Seed Box researcher, and program director, and Kristin Zeiler, LiU, affiliated researcher. Together, they are an interdisciplinary team with expertise in the social sciences and humanities, especially political-economy, dialogical sense-making and feminist phenomenology. All have worked with subjectivity and how people related to change processes, though the change processes we have studied are quite different. Wibeck, Linnér and Woroniecki have studied how people make sense of sustainability transformations, whilst Zeiler has studied how people experience changes to their bodies in medical contexts. Here, these approaches together to address understudied dimensions of environmental change.

The project is furthermore collaborating with Api Movono, researcher, Massey University, New Zealand, Franco Vaccarino, Massey University, Pamela Feetham, Massey University and Priyatma Singh, University of Fiji, Fiji.