I would like to invite you to submit an abstract to the TG07 Senses and Society session, “Outside the Climatic Environmental Bubble: Sensing Climate Change at the Margins”, within the XXI International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology, which will be held in Gwangju, Korea, from July 4th - July 10th 2027.

Session Description
Recent scholarship has argued that the effects of climate change are embodied and felt in quotidian realities. These developments depart from dominant bureaucratic, numerical, and meteorological approaches. This panel revisits and takes Erik Cohen’s (2018) notion of the climatic environmental bubble as a point of departure. Cohen’s concept helps to illustrate how social actors use “micro-modifications of the climatic conditions” around them to protect themselves from the deleterious sensory effects of the climate crisis. However, such protection hinges on the comprehensiveness of the climatic environmental bubble, which, in turn, is affected by “factors like social class, migratory status, and possibly also gender”. This panel is thus interested in questions that include but are not limited to:

1. How are the sensory inequalities of climate change differentially experienced across gendered, classed, racialised, and other marginalised social positions?
2. How does the climate crisis unsettle the various established sensory scripts through which everyday life is organised, from foodways and food security to seasonal rhythms and practices of thermal adaptation?
3. How can sensory knowledge complement meteorological data to reveal climate vulnerability?
4. How can this knowledge contribute to climate justice and equitable climate governance?
5. And more!

We invite theoretical, methodological, applied, and empirical accounts that broadly consider how the climate crisis is sensed outside this climatic environmental bubble across diverse regional contexts.

Language: English
Session Type: Oral

References
Cohen, E. (2018). Climatic Environmental Bubbles and Social Inequalities. In K.E.Y. Low & D. Kalekin-Fishman (Eds.), Senses in Cities: Experiences of Urban Settings (pp. 11-24). Routledge

Important Dates and Information:
Prospective participants can submit abstracts (not more than 300 words) online via the XXI ISA WCS confex from 3rd August 2026. The deadline for this Call for Abstracts is October 14th 2026 (23:59 UTC/GMT). Subsequently, participants will be notified of the outcome of their proposals by December 4th 2026.

NOTE: The program coordinators of TG07 Senses and Society have given the green light for session organisers to circulate this CBA with networks early. Since applications for sessions are not yet officially open, please contact the session organiser, Benjamin Harris (email listed below), to express your interest in submitting to this session. The session organiser will then get in touch with you with further instructions on how to submit via the portal when applications open. In the meantime, do take the extra time to conceptualise and prepare a proposal if interested.

Warm Regards,
Benjamin Harris (he/they)
National University of Singapore, Singapore
e0418221@u.nus.edu
Session Organiser, “Outside the Climatic Environmental Bubble: Sensing Climate Change at the Margins”