This seminar will be in person at Niagara C0826 and hybrid on Zoom (link here).
Speaker: Fabiola Melchior
Title: Climate Injustice and the Reconfiguration of Fire Insurance
Abstract: My doctoral research investigates how increasing intensity and severity of wildfires, alongside other climate change induced disasters, are reconfiguring the role of insurance. While the localized impacts of wildfires are unique geographically, wildfire’s intensifying impacts are global. Alterations in weather patterns and ecosystems due to climate change combined with a century of fire suppression tactics that were normalized during settler colonial and urbanizing processes have been attributed as key drivers to the increasing intensity and severity of wildfires. Within this context, Global North countries have naturalized property and fire insurance as the financial mechanism to hedge risk in locations where fire and property meet (i.e. at the wildland-urban interface), presenting unique opportunities to consider value, governance, and risk as socially and legally constructed. Who can (and cannot) stay and/or rebuild post-wildfire is increasingly determined by insurance coverage – or a lack thereof. Insurance itself, however, is deeply entangled with socio-legal and political geographies including access to property that have long operated along power geometries engrained within social contexts. My research seeks to mobilise Brenna Bhandar’s conceptualisation of “racial regimes of ownership“ (and property) alongside scholarship tracing the ongoing colonial histories of insurance (e.g. from the transatlantic slave trade to settler property regimes in so-called Canada) to excavate the ways in which oppressive legacies of insurance as a financial risk-hedging tool continue to materialize in the context of intensifying wildfires, today, along colonial, racialized and gendered lines.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. Bring your lunch! If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.