ABSTRACT
Everyday, ordinary and extraordinary weather events are profoundly revealing of the inseparability of all places from climate, place, as well as of our continuous bodily and technological preoccupation with atmospheric conditions. But weather events do not just ‘happen.’ By engaging with weather—whether it is turning on a fan, adding ice to our drinks, or perhaps by planning for street snow removal or shopping for beachwear—we engage in practices through which we control, modify, endure, adapt to, enjoy, or remove ourselves from the weather-places we inhabit. Practices of course depend on experiences. We sense warmth so we ask for ice for our drinks. We feel a chill, so we slip under a blanket. We notice it’s windy, so we go surfing. Finally, we represent weather places by taking pictures for social media, by engaging in small talk with strangers, by sharing memories, by developing knowledge that can assist us in choosing when to go on holiday, and so forth. Unlike positivist and atomizing perspectives which treat the weather as an independent variable somehow external to the lifeworld, and yet capable of determining multiple behaviors, in this chapter we conceptualize the weather as an inescapable medium for our existence in the world. Following a phenomenological and relational perspective we argue that through practices, representations, and experiences we are immersed within concrete events of weather as a condition of our being-in-the-world.
