Rebelling for life: An ethnographic study of climate activism as post-secular time-work in Extinction Rebellion UK

This research addresses temporality, or lived social experiences of time, in the Anthropocene and how diverse temporalities critique the secular modernist paradigm. I focus on the existential conditions of living through a time of climate crisis since we so often hear in relation to climate change, "time is running out". The project methodology entailed 14 months of ethnographic research with climate activists in south-east England, primarily Brighton, East Sussex, in order to gain deep and embedded insight into the entanglements of political engagement and personal ethics in a relationality shaped by life under climate change.

Previous social theory has addressed transformations to the social experience and measurement of time through the interlinked processes of modernisation, secularisation and capitalist industrialisation. I consider the impact of lived experience of the Anthropocene on these processes, and how the social experience of a time of climate breakdown interrupts and critiques notions of time as empty and homogenous. I argue that climate activism which disrupts the time-space of the public sphere, as seen in XR's protests, demands recognition of what Charles Taylor has termed 'higher times' in a non-secular register. Climate civil disobedience aims to accelerate anticipated disruption of climate breakdown into the present in an effort to change the future, and in this sense can be understood as 'time-work.' To consider temporality under climate change is also to consider activists' anticipation of their own, or their kins', futures, and the existential, emotional and relational challenges this precipitates. More broadly, this research traces how debates and tensions within activist work around developing effective theories of change and regenerative cultures are shaped by contrasting influences, such as the institutions and legacies of Whiteness on the one hand, and spiritual-but-not-religious movements, decoloniality and deep ecology on the other.