Summary
Spivak describes the planet as something radically different from us. Not something we can fully know, master, or speak for. She calls it a “species of alterity,” a kind of otherness. For climate research, this matters. It means climate science needs the humility to admit what it doesn't know, and it means that communities living closest to climate impacts, in East London and everywhere else, have something real to bring to the table. Not because they “speak for nature,” but because their lived experience of heat, flooding, and pollution is itself a form of knowledge that gets left out too often.
Key findings
At People Street, we often talk about communities who are excluded, under-served, or seldom heard. Spivak's point sharpens that language. Not every group that suffers, or is left out, is subaltern in this strict sense. Subalternity is about being cut off from the systems, the vote, the public voice, the recognition, that let a claim even get heard in the first place. Some of the communities we work with are closer to that position than others. Naming that difference honestly matters more than we'd realised.