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- Convenors:
-
Randi Irwin
(University of Newcastle, Australia)
Hedda Haugen Askland (University of Newcastle)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Life on Earth
- Location:
- NIKERI KC2.214
- Sessions:
- Friday 25 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
This panel turns to the tension between the contemporary moment and anticipated futures in order to examine how it informs planning, preparation, and activism that seeks to embrace or alter the anticipated trajectory of climate change and environmental destruction.
Long Abstract:
Manifestations of climate change, including bushfires, floods, hotter days, and rising sea levels, are markings of our changing world. Such manifestations—the effects of climate change—are not projections into a far-away future but parts of a reality that shape the politics and lived experiences of the present. Lived experiences of climate change and associated environmental destruction inform how communities anticipate the scope of future changes to land, economies, and communities. This panel turns to the tension between the contemporary moment and anticipated futures and examines how various stakeholders seek to embrace or alter the anticipated trajectory of climate change and environmental destruction through environmental planning, preparation, and activism. We are particularly interested papers that explore the ways in which contemporary experiences of climate change and environmental destruction shape community activism that seeks to make a different - less destructive - future possible. What does this activism look like? What futures are envisaged? What are the political possibilities that coincide with the anticipatory nature of climactic despair or hope? How do expectations or experiences of displacement figure into the ways in which community and place are understood in the interstices of the present and future? How do anticipated climate futures shape the concept of livability in the present?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 25 November, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how various actors in the city of Milan are attempting to consider, define and produce atmosphere as a field of intersubjective action to achieve social and environmental change.
Paper long abstract:
Affect theory has also put a special focus on contagion, on the transmission and communication of affects between people. The more recent development of atmosphere as a concept have begun to put these ideas together, by looking at the atmosphere of place as a dynamic which both produces and is produced by affect in people. There are flaws and there are limits to this concept. Within the affective turbulence of atmospheres there are hierarchies, differentiation, positive and negative affects. Nonetheless it is a concept that binds people together with place in some sense. This paper looks at over a decade of policy development and activism in the city of Milan from 2010-2020 in Milan to try to change both the social and environmental atmosphere of the city. How have collective affects like melancholia, boredom, disgust, anger and excitement spread in certain moments? In what way are they contributing to the atmosphere and being excited by them? What limits are they confronting and is there a way they can be overcome? This paper will look at how various actors consider, define and produce atmosphere as a field of intersubjective action to achieve change.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses solarpunk, a movement of art, writing, and activism responding to climate crises and impending dystopia by imagining hopeful alternative futures centring sustainability, equity, and an ethics of relation with the more-than-human world, that people can relate to and work towards.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents a discussion of solarpunk as a movement focused on imagining and working towards hopeful futures. The paper is based on my ongoing digital ethnographic fieldwork with solarpunks from around the world, exploring their responses to climate crises and the prevalence of dystopian thinking. Solarpunk is a global distributed movement shaped through and enabled by digital social media technologies through which solarpunks connect to share their perspectives, skills, climate news, tech developments, art and fiction. Solarpunks draw upon this diversity of shared resources, experiences, and cultural knowledges to inform their imaginings of hopeful futures built around the core values of environmental and social justice. Solarpunk art and stories are an example of Radical Imagination, involving a rethinking the ethics of how we relate to each other, other non-human beings, our economic and institutional frameworks, and the physical environment. The ethics of relation these solarpunk imaginings promote is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, drawing upon different Indigenous perspectives that centre kinship and reciprocity with the entire more-than-human web of life we are embedded within. These principles inform how technological and social changes work together to address climate and social issues in solarpunk futures. In this paper, I interrogate how imagining hopeful solarpunk futures is more than escapist fantasy. I argue that solarpunk, whilst global in its constitution, incorporates practical community empowering processes whereby solarpunks work within local communities to collaboratively envision more positive futures for their local areas and the potential paths to implement these futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers a placed-based portrait of affective experiences through time within the context of the Anthropocene. This research, conducted with volunteer gardeners at an urban farm in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, focuses on their temporal journeys and reorientations in ways of dwelling.
Paper long abstract:
What role do our feelings play in dictating our motivations and aspirations during the climate crisis? Can these feelings move us to envision the future in more hopeful ways? As the existential threat of the climate crisis looms large, these questions must be asked and answered. This paper aims to do exactly that by focusing on volunteers working with an environmental social enterprise called CERES at an urban farm in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. Using the stories of seven volunteers, I look at what motivated these people to become involved with the organisation, what keeps them incentivised to stay, what they would like to see happen in the future, and what they envisage doing to bring such future about.
Drawing on a blend of participant observation and interviews, I obtained data through fieldwork and one-on-one conversations. My findings indicate that past feelings of dissatisfaction with experiences of acceleration and disconnection in their ways of dwelling acted as the catalyst to bring participants to volunteering. Volunteers experience their work at the farm as being grounded in producing various forms of connectivity — from enchantment with the place they are in, to embodied relations between people and plants. This deepening emplacement has created opportunities for volunteers to imagine the future in hopeful ways. My interest is in demonstrating how these shifts in actions are entangled with a myriad of affective experiences through time, and how a such affective experiences can lead individuals to conceive of hopeful, environmentally sustainable futures.