ABSTRACT. Training for a Better Future. Climate activism and individualization processes
Training for a Better Future
Climate activism and individualization processes
Camille Allard, Department of Social and Political Science – Università degli Studi di Milano
camille.allard@unimi.it
Enzo Colombo, Department of Social and Political Science – Università degli Studi di Milano
enzo.colombo@unimi.it
Mirco Costacurta, Department of Social and Political Science – Università degli Studi di Milano
Mirco.costacurta@unimi.it
The contribution focuses on how youth climate activists represent the future, considering the social imaginaries that orient their perception of risks and opportunities and push them to be active. The social imaginary, understood as the human capacity to transcend what is already given, to outline potential realities oriented towards the future and not yet fully realised, implies the possibility of going beyond what is experienced first-hand. It can be conceived as a specific dimension of culture (Appadurai 2013; Delanty 2024) that refers to the ways in which a group constantly works for and gives meaning to the emergence of the new, to the articulation of the past, present and future, and to the capacity to transcend the already given. The concept of social imaginary is an established part of the toolbox of sociology. As Charles Taylor (2004) observes, the social imaginary does not consist of a set of ideas; it is rather what makes society’s practices possible by giving them meaning. Unlike Taylor, however, who tends to consider the imaginary as the ‘condition’ of thought, superimposing it to a large extent on the concept of culture or common sense, our analysis is concerned with the space of potential criticism of the existing and of thinking-as-the-usual that the imaginary allows (Bottici 2014). Following Castoriadis (1987, 2007), the imaginary and the imagination are conceived as the faculty of radical innovation, creation and training. The imaginary is, in this case, the space within which the ability of critical thought on the existing is exercised, the ability to transcend what has already been given, giving life to ‘alternative’ realities and preparing for a different future (Milkoreit 2017).
Social imaginary is conceived as an inherently future-oriented concept, especially in relation to climate change and technological acceleration. With environmental crisis and sociotechnical transformations – digital sphere, AI and parallel realities such as metaverse – imaginaries are deeply influenced in the way in which young activists produce new future orientations about the environment (Altstaedt 2024; Davoudi and Machen 2022).
The study is based on 70 in-depth narrative interviews with climate change movement activists and PhD students whose research project is connected with environmental issues. The interviewees are aged between 17 and 35 years old.
The interviews focused on the representation of the future in the context of climate change and how such representations – utopian or dystopian – can impact daily behaviour and collective action. The aim is to analyse how and to what extent the imaginative dimensions produced by young people about the future of planet Earth are used by them as a rhetorical resource of denunciation and action, how the imagination produced allows them to define a space of thought, understanding and action capable of opening up new spaces for participation. In this way, imagination contributes to a different and more complete knowledge of the risks associated with climate change and of the possible forms of risk containment. The production of utopian and dystopian images represents in fact a relevant and effective way of disseminating scientific knowledge and political messages, potentially fostering a more acute awareness of risks and greater public participation.
Social imaginaries are closely connected to political action (Shah 2024). By making subjects feel embodied in a social reality that has not yet fully realized itself but is already part of the present, they induce a sense of urgency or immediacy that prompts people to take a position, that orients the perception and evaluation of the situation, and that motivates action and aspirations. Hence, a critical imaginary can emerge on a battlefield where value orientations, emotions, common sense, personal imagination, and the collective social imaginary unmask the interiorization of a previous imaginary considered dominant and coercive, and where moments of creative production and prefiguration are promoted.
The results presented are part of the research “Young entrepreneurs of creative environmental imagery (YECEI): how young environmental activists and writers of climate fiction conceive, represent and enact values of well-being and enhancement of ecological citizenship”; Prin, call 2022 PNRR, financed by the European Union – Next Generation EU, Mission 4 Component 1 CUP G53D23007150001
References
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2024 «Future-culture: How future imaginations disseminate throughout the social», in European Journal of Social Theory 27, 2, pp. 279-297.
Appadurai, Arjun
2013 The Future as Cultural Fact. Essays on the Global Condition, London, Verso.
Bottici, Chiara
2014 Imaginal politics: Images beyond imagination and the imaginary, New York, Columbia University Press.
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1987 The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, Polity Press.
2007 Figures of the Thinkable, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Davoudi, Simin, Machen, Ruth
2022 «Climate imaginaries and the mattering of the medium», in Geoforum 137, pp. 203-212.
Delanty, Gerard
2024 Senses of the Future. Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Milkoreit, Manjana
2017 «Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future», in Elementa. Science of the Anthropocene 5, 62, pp. 1-18.
Shah, M. Tamanna
2024 «Emotions in Politics: A Review of Contemporary Perspectives and Trends», in International Political Science Abstracts 74, 1, pp. 1-14.
Taylor, Charles
2004 Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, Duke University Press.
