Contribution short abstract

The talk shares an ongoing arts-led project adopting poetry-writing as a popular education methodology inspiring intersectional climate justice. The poetry workshops tackle the trans-national impacts of financialised savings of the global North, inviting emotions from discomfort to empowerment.

Contribution long abstract

The roundtable talk shares insights and questions from an ongoing artistic/environmental humanities research project, which experiments with learning and writing documentary poetry as a form of intersectional climate justice education. The key method includes poetry-writing workshops in different settings, mainly in education and cultural spaces in the European North (with planned research stay in South Africa).

In the spirit of popular education, the poetry workshops create spaces of learning about socio-environmental contentions, as well as discussion using political ecology concepts, e.g. “ecologically unequal exchange,” green/grey extractivisms ecological debt, resource colonialism, etc. Poetry exercises work with policy, legal, corporate, scholarly and journalistic/independent materials. These are associated to contentious savings tied to pension savings in Sweden.

The transnational socio-environmental impacts of private and public savings are largely invisibilised from the citizens/workers/pension savers. In Sweden, the state-run pension funds invest more than 350 billion USD into bonds and shares in thousands of enterprises across the world. These investments cause millions of tonnes of GHG emissions. This makes it a crucial area for trans-hemispheric climate justice, and arena for repair and solidarity work.

How can an art-research practice address this “unsettling” reality for transformative learning, acknowledging and “holding together hope and despair” (Beban, Korson, 2025). The intricacy of the financialised savings system, as well as “our” (workshop participants’) different complicity in it, may invite feelings of disempowerment and hopelessness. Yet, through collective creative work in a study setting, the workshops aim to empower and inspire transnational solidarity with the most affected peoples and areas.