Paper short abstract:

Interwoven practices and socialities in the UK Climate Justice movement feature a spirit of experimentation and increasing openness to change. For activists, time is experienced through a fluctuation between possibility and actuality, which merge as prefigurative moves draw in possible future(s).

Paper long abstract:

Set against the spectre of catastrophic climate change, the UK Camp for Climate Action enacted fleeting 'future homes' annually from 2006 to 2010, mixing low-impact living; the sharing of skills, information and resources; and direct action against climate change perpetrators. From 2010, UK climate activism diffused into multiple interlinked projects often fused with other campaigns, such as in the case of the group Fuel Poverty Action (FPA).

The paper draws on ethnographic material from participation in Climate Camp and FPA to trace interwoven practices and socialities in the UK's climate justice movement, which hold at their heart a spirit of experimentation, increasingly accompanied by an openness to change in response to reflexive scrutiny, both of which link to experiences of time and political struggle as intertwined and highly uneven.

The material suggests that indeterminacy is central to these struggles for change, the flip-side of which is a particular experience of time - not as a linear chain of events, but rather as a constant (though uneven) opening up of possibility and actuality, the boundaries between which blur and at times collapse altogether. Such prefigurative moves - or moments - entail a reaching out across indeterminate intervals, by virtue of an immanently felt relationality that links to a foundational ethic of mutuality - the promise of connection.

Activists are thus both supported to undertake risky action in increasingly uncertain worlds, and integrated into broader struggles for socio-political change from the ground up - experienced as on-rolling processes of revolution.