Towards a Sociology of Incumbency in the Face of Climate Change

Department seminar with speaker Rebecca Elliott, Associate Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science.

All members of the Department of Sociology and research staff from across the faculty are invited to attend.

Abstract

In the face of increasingly intense climate-related disasters, many social actors are working strenuously to keep things the same, to keep things in place. They want to insist that certain things should not and do not have to change in the face of the climate crisis. In this presentation of work-in-progress, I probe this conviction through what I am tentatively calling a sociology of “incumbency.” Incumbency captures an often-implicit commitment to preserving present arrangements of people and property, and the familiar land uses, skylines, nebulous “character” of place, routines of life, and identities those arrangements generate. Incumbency expresses the resonance of an unremarked understanding that who is there now has something like a right to stay, and that what is physically in place now is worthy of protection. I develop an analytical framework for discerning the historical, political economic, and affective dimensions of incumbency on the basis of a census of climate change adaptation infrastructure projects in the coastal United States, as well as a detailed case study of a planned seawall in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. This climate change adaptation infrastructure both makes and expresses incumbency’s possibility.