[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Climate change is disrupting and will continue to disrupt peoples' lives and communities all over the world. Nevertheless, a vast majority of research has focused on the environmental and/oreconomic consequences of the phenomena, while relatively little attention has been granted to how people manage to refashion their identities, cultures, and communities. This is a dramatic oversight precisely because selves and ways of life will have to be refashioned in response to environmental transformations associated with climate change if communities are to be sustained. Accordingly, in this dissertation I utilize data from over a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork in Sumner, Missouri to analyze how people had been and were remaking their identities, culture, and community in response to a shift in trans-national goose migration patterns that was facilitated, at least in part, by climate change. I make the following three arguments. First, lives and communities will be remade through coconstitutive interactions between multiple (non)human things, beings, and institutions across scales of space and time. Second, absences and uncertainties will be crucially important to how people reconstruct their lives and communities. Third, inequalities inform and are remade through adaptations to climate change. Combined, I argue the complexities of communities can provide vital resources for facilitating adaptations, but that these complexities can and do shape adaptations in ways that can facilitate the reproduction, or even intensification, of inequalities.
Beyond the Tipping Point: Understanding Perceptions of Abrupt Climate Change and Their Implications
