A Fire and Altadena: Biographical Diffraction and Climate Disaster Loss

This paper develops a conceptualization of biographical diffraction via a creative autoethnography of climate disaster grief. In January 2025, the Eaton Fire devastated Altadena, California killing 19 people and destroying over 9,000 structures. Among them was my family home. Having lived abroad in Aotearoa New Zealand for 5 years, I return to Altadena after the fire, navigating loss from sites of distance and proximity. Drawing upon Barad's concept of diffraction and the void, I grapple with the asymmetries of grief, privilege, belonging, and self that emerge with the loss of "home." To do so, I craft a narrative with audio recordings of my footsteps walking around the debris of the Eaton Fire burn scar. By weaving together sensory vignettes, evocative writing, images, and reflections I consider how climate disaster grief is an embodied and emplaced phenomenon both historically entangled and unequally distributed. I then draw upon cross-cultural learnings to explore how Indigenous knowledge can, and cannot, inform healing of place and self from positions of settler-colonialism. Biographical diffraction is thus presented as a tool for attending to the layered emotional, material, and political dimensions of climate disaster, particularly when "home" becomes an unrecognizable site of trauma, memory, and transformation.