Beyond Extinction: Climate Activisms and the (Re)Making of Futures

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Climate activism is one of the most pressing movements of our times. Despite its prominence,scholarly work has overlooked a critical concept at the heart of climate activism: 'the future'.This research directly addresses this gap mobilising creative methods to explore how futuresare produced and circulated in contemporary climate activisms. Whether the future is framedas a time of extinction, or through invocations of the urgency of emergency, contemporaryclimate activisms are animated by claims about the future. However, despite their increasingfrequency and scale, little attention has been given to how exactly futures are present inrecent climate protests, and their relation to a novel context in which human and non-humanentanglement is increasingly recognised, By working with three movements central to thenew climate activism, Extinction Rebellion (XR), Fridays for Future (FFF) and Black LivesMatter UK (BLMUK), this project will examine how the futures that animate climate activismsare formed, and their effect on the enactment of activist subjectivities. What types of futurescirculate in the spaces of recent climate activisms? Which agents populate these futureworlds? And how does the existence of these shared futures transform human subjectivities,and the relations that exist between activists, other people, and non-human worlds andactors? The research will work with activists across the movements through ethnography,interviews, and arts-supplemented interviews, specifically painting as method. Vitally, thiswork will cast critical light on one of the most important movements of our times.