The Coloniality of Climate Mobilities and Human Differentiation. A Carribean Critique

In this talk, based on an article co-authored with Kevon Rhiney, we argue that the Caribbean region’s disproportionate vulnerability to the adverse effects of a changing climate cannot be separated from the historical conditions and logics that brought about the contemporary world and Western modernity—in particular as a system based in uneven mobilities and human differentiation. Discourses on and responses to climate change cannot be separated from these longer colonial histories that continue to structure present-day vulnerabilities and (im)mobilities. The notion of a singular and undifferentiated ‘humanity’ (assumed in concepts like the Anthropocene) fails to recognize the ways Western modernity is marked by a long history of colonialism that was predicated on human differentiation and subordination. These experiences point to the need to break away from the universalizing, Eurocentric and techno-scientific discourses that animate current understandings of climate adaptation (and their discursive and material implications, such as new kinds of governance of highly differentiated mobility infrastructures). Caribbean critiques argue that there is a need to deconstruct the ‘human’ in these grand narratives to highlight the uneven historical ways different groups (or genres) of humans and nation states have been forcefully inserted in the global economy and how these continue to shape contemporary climate inequities and (im)mobilities.

Mimi Sheller, Ph.D., is Professor of Integrative and Global Studies and was Inaugural Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, USA (2021-2026). Sheller was founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers: Journal of Mobility Studies and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She has published 15 books and more than 180 articles and chapters, the most recent being the co-edited volumes Navigating Detours in the Mobility Transition (EPFL Press, 2026; Routledge, 2027); and Building Equitable Climate Adaptation in the US Caribbean (Palgrave Pivot, 2026). She is currently Co-PI for the Caribbean Collaborative Action Network, a NOAA-RISA team, and holds a three-year Fulbright Specialist Award.