Policy IRL
Climate change is often spoken about as though it exists somewhere else, or sometime later. It is measured in degrees, emissions targets, and parts per million. But climate change is intimate. It is woven into our everyday lives—in the water we drink, the products we use, the homes we inhabit, and the futures we imagine.
Policy IRL explores the entanglements between climate, policy, and everyday life. Through stories rooted in communities, landscapes, and lived experience, each episode follows a question, a relationship, or a moment of curiosity outward to the systems, institutions, and decisions that shape our world.
By making climate change and climate policy more legible, Policy IRL seeks to illuminate not only how we got here, but how we might build more resilient futures.
Hosted by Bhargavi Narayanan.
Bhargavi Narayanan
Bhargavi Narayanan is a documentary storyteller, researcher, and host of Policy IRL. Curious about the ways climate change and climate policy become visible in everyday life, she follows stories from intimate experiences outward to the systems that shape them, through conversations with communities, scientists, practitioners, and advocates.
Bhargavi is currently completing a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara and has worked across documentary filmmaking, program evaluation, and community-based research. Policy IRL brings those worlds together in pursuit of stories that start small and turn out to be about everything.
She is based in the Bay Area and believes that some of the most interesting stories start close to home.