Ethics and Aesthetics of Direct Climate Action

As the impacts of climate catastrophe worsen and the possibilities of systemic change remain improbable, spectacularized acts of civil disobedience play an increasing role in public debate on climate change. The term “eco-terrorism,” often attached to these forms of protest, is highly contested and used to justify heavy-handed policing and legislative responses. Following the mass, non-violent disobedience staged by Extinction Rebellion, groups such as Ende Gelände, Just Stop Oil, and Insulate Britain have taken direct action against energy infrastructures. Defending land against the neocolonialist expansion of this infrastructure, long-standing acts of resistance by Indigenous communities have also gained prominence: most recently the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and the Wet’suwet’en First Nation-led blockades across Canada. That works of art and cultural institutions have also been targets of action by groups like Just Stop Oil invites us to consider forms of direct climate action as they emerge as and in works of art. This seminar seeks to interrogate such action as it becomes bound up in forms, relations, and temporalities of ecocritical artistic production, reception, and scholarship.

The necessity for sometimes violent acts of resistance threads through the radical environmental discourse of the 60s and 70s (Abbey, Foreman), but is also taken up by ecofascist ideologies such as that of the “Unabomber” of the 80s. Against the backdrop of the contemporary climate emergency, unassuming modes of resistance such as guerilla gardening rub up against Andreas Malm’s provocation How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2020). While “ecotage” of this kind must negotiate enduring tensions around class and race identities of its perpetrators and victims, Jean-Thomas Tremblay has argued that it refuses legibility within the “future-guaranteeing practices” of mainstream environmentalist discourse. On the other hand, queer, trans*, and feminist ecologies re-imagine alternative ways of being-with towards just and viable presents and futures (Mortimer-Sandilands; Hayward; Bedford). While some contemporary Anglophone cultural productions foreground lethal forms of direct action, others explore modes of resistance across slower temporalities and smaller scales.

We invite paper submissions that engage with acts of ecological resistance and their mediation through a wide-range of cultural forms. What set of quasi-generic tropes emerge in narratives of “eco-terrorism”? Which affective registers – anxiety, grief, “earth emotions” (G. Albrecht) – color the ethical quandaries of these narratives? What forms of varied or conflicted temporalities (spectacular, deep) are engaged? How might forms of direct action call forward or foreclose alternative ways of kin-making or becoming-with (Haraway)? How does direct climate action stage individual and collective identities against uneven patterns of destruction in the Capitalocene (Moore)?