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

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 futures
are produced and circulated in contemporary climate activisms. Whether the future is framed
as a time of extinction, or through invocations of the urgency of emergency, contemporary
climate activisms are animated by claims about the future. However, despite their increasing
frequency and scale, little attention has been given to how exactly futures are present in
recent climate protests, and their relation to a novel context in which human and non-human
entanglement is increasingly recognised, By working with three movements central to the
new climate activism, Extinction Rebellion (XR), Fridays for Future (FFF) and Black Lives
Matter UK (BLMUK), this project will examine how the futures that animate climate activisms
are formed, and their effect on the enactment of activist subjectivities. What types of futures
circulate in the spaces of recent climate activisms? Which agents populate these future
worlds? 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 and
actors? The research will work with activists across the movements through ethnography,
interviews, and arts-supplemented interviews, specifically painting as method. Vitally, this
work will cast critical light on one of the most important movements of our times.