ABSTRACT
How to bring power dynamics into view is a perennial problem for climate change social science researchers. One approach is to unpack the background context in which controversies and cases relating to the fossil fuel regime and its social complexities are situated. Legal geography is well-suited to the task of attending to the distributed and pervasive background character of law – both formal and informal – and the ways it shapes landscapes of political contestation. To this end, we draw on David Delaney’s “nomosphere” and Jacques Rancière’s “politics of aesthetics”, which describes how certain worlds are made visible and sensible while others are not. Using this theory, we argue that understanding and addressing the complexities of the fossil fuel regime and its connections to climate change requires a legal geography attuned to the non-representational dimensions of law. In doing so, we frame research as a political tool that contributes to determining what is made visible, what problems are recognised and what arguments and responses are legitimated. This, in turn, requires reflexivity on our part as researchers into which political and aesthetic acts, orders and regimes our work contributes.
