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Making sense of climate change: hybrid epistemologies, socio‐natural assemblages and smallholder knowledge
Author(s) -
Burnham Morey,
Ma Zhao,
Zhang Baoqing
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
area
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1475-4762
pISSN - 0004-0894
DOI - 10.1111/area.12150
Subject(s) - climate change , cognitive dissonance , perception , natural (archaeology) , politics , sociology , perspective (graphical) , environmental resource management , ecology , geography , epistemology , political science , social psychology , psychology , environmental science , computer science , philosophy , artificial intelligence , archaeology , law , biology
This paper uses a mixed‐method approach to investigate smallholder perceptions of climate change in the Loess Plateau region of C hina. We combine qualitative and quantitative research methods with climate data analysis to gauge the climatic changes smallholders have perceived over the last 30 years, as well as how these changes have been experienced. At two research sites, each method produced markedly different results. Drawing on the work of feminist political ecologists and other geographers, we suggest that the dissonance between data sets generated using different research methods arises because each method produces knowledge that is partial and situated. To explain the contradictions between smallholder perceptions of climate change across the qualitative and quantitative methods and their disagreement with the climate record, we adopt aspects of assemblage theory and the dwelling perspective to suggest that smallholder knowledge of climate change is structured through their observations of and interactions with dynamic, networked socio‐natural assemblages. We argue that a better understanding of the conduits through which perceptions and experiences of climate change come into being, and hence how climate knowledge is shaped, is necessary to account for the multiple epistemologies through which climate change is known.