Temporal mappings of climate change across everyday and political behaviors

With Amalia Alvarez-Benjumea and Fabian Winter

Forthcoming, American Sociological Review

ABSTRACT: Drawing on a survey deployed for this purpose, we track how individuals’ temporal mappings of climate change relate to action meant to address the climate crisis. We make two innovations over the literature to date. First, we look to how individuals coordinate their own action across both first- and second-order futures, namely what individuals expect for the future, and their sense of relevant others’ expectations. Second, we attend to the broader temporal maps individuals construct with reference to a phenomenon such as climate change, taking into account past impacts of climate change, and the turning points past which respondents believe climate change can no longer be addressed. We therefore show how both everyday action such as recycling and political behaviors such as protesting are coordinated across these temporal maps. Taken together, ours is both a conceptual contribution to understandings of action and temporality, and empirical insight into how individuals navigate the climate crisis.