Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the role of eco-emotions in far-right discourses of environmental and reproductive futures in the United Kingdom, through analysing media and materials produced by far-right, fascist, and ‘anti gender’ groups, policy documents and mainstream media.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the role of eco-emotions in far-right discourses of environmental and reproductive futures in the United Kingdom. It is vital to begin to understand how eco-emotions – a central concern in contemporary climate activism - can be weaponised for reactionary means, in a context of growing authoritarianism. The paper analyses media and materials produced by far-right, fascist and ‘anti gender’ groups, policy documents and mainstream media. It understands the borders between the extreme and the mainstream as permeable and contigent (Mondon and Winter, 2020) and is attentive to the relationship between far-right discourses of replacement, overpopulation, degradation, scarcity and the emergence of xenophobic, nationalist and populationist policy proposals. Contemporary research on eco-emotions and climate activism has focused on fear, anxiety and grief (Pinkhala, 2022). However, political orientation cannot be taken for granted, as Bhatia and Hendrixson’s research on ecofascist solastalgia and the interconnection of eco and demographic anxiety in the US demonstrates (2025). This paper builds on Menrisky’s notion of everyday ecofascism as ‘intimately connected with narratives of ecological belonging,’ which is ‘mapped onto discourses of territory and race’ (2025: 24) to examine how different emotions – anxiety, fear, shame, hate, even love (Beyer and Weisskircher, 2024) – are mobilised in relation to far-right discourses on reproductive and environmental futures, which work to normalise racist state violence, legitimise practices of eco-bordering (Turner and Bailey, 2022; Benoist et al, 2024) and populationist interventions that seek to control the mobility and reproduction of global majority women (Iossifidis, 2026).