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

Abstract

This thesis tells a story about the multiple temporalities that compose climate change. It does so through research with one of the UK’s most notable climate movements in recent years – Extinction Rebellion. How do climate activists imagine the future? Is the future met with optimism or anxiety? Is tomorrow imagined as an apocalypse or through the earth’s salvation? Is the future even imagined at all? By answering such questions, this thesis illustrates that imaginations and the temporalities which inform them come to matter in how we know and ultimately govern climate change.

It is by drawing on and developing from queer theories that this thesis considers how sexual politics animates the temporalities, affects and relations that circulate within imaginations of climate crisis. I use queer theories to do two key things in this thesis. Firstly, I use queer theories locate and challenge the presence of heteronormativity in imaginations of climate crisis. Here, I show that western articulations of climate crisis often draw on forms of (post)apocalyptic straight time, which privilege heterosexual values, ideals and lifestyles. Secondly, I employ queer theories’ ability to broaden the imagination, tracing alternative relations that resist accelerating climate change. In these relations there exist alternative ethical regimes which are nonteleological and nonfamilial but which proceed nevertheless through care for the environment.

To make such arguments, I experiment with research methodologies for the Anthropocene. Blending together interviews and ethnography with painting, drawing and collaging, I have created a speculative methodology attuned to the many meanings, imaginations temporalities, affects, and relations which assemble climate change. Reflecting on these methods, I am able to consider how environmentalism can function without its usual existential anxieties, end-thinking and extinction scripts.