Ana Cerezuela, a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology and researcher in the AFIN Group for the project Living Pregnancy in Barcelona: Women and Pregnant People Facing the Climate Emergency, has published the popular science article “A House in the Desert: Reconfigurations of Water and Time by Mothers of Barcelona” in the Fall 2025 edition of Weather Matters, an independent and interdisciplinary publication supported by the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society (InSiS) at the University of Oxford. The article appears in a special issue titled Unruly Ecologies: Reconfiguring Climate Knowledge through Refusal, Resistance, and (Dis)Rupture, which explores how attempts to know, govern, or intervene in environments and climates encounter incomplete processes, tensions, and resistance.
Ana Cerezuela’s article is based on the qualitative phase of the study on pregnancy and climate emergency conducted by the AFIN Group, with support from the Barcelona City Council, Hospital Sant Pau, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, and Hospital del Mar. The research analyzes how the effects of pollution and climate change in the city of Barcelona influence reproductive health, caregiving practices, and the ways in which mothers envision the future.
Participants reflected on climate anxiety, the loss of familiar landscapes, and everyday tensions caused by extreme heat, pollution, or the lack of green spaces. Their accounts reveal how these phenomena reconfigure the experience of raising children in a context of uncertainty, as well as the care strategies that mothers develop to sustain their children’s lives.
Combining results from ethnographic interviews conducted across different districts of the city with personal reflections, the article specifically explores experiences related to time (past and future) and water extremes (droughts and floods). Through the participants’ accounts and the researchers’ experiences across the seasons during the fieldwork, it offers a reflection on how extreme weather events intersect with motherhood and child-rearing, as well as perceptions of emerging environmental risks.
The article can be read at the following link: https://www.weathermatters.net/a-house-in-the-desert