Unruly Climates, Contested Futures
Imaginaries and Politics of Climate Resistance in Europe
Distributed for Campus Verlag
Unruly Climates, Contested Futures
Imaginaries and Politics of Climate Resistance in Europe
An exploration of how different forms of collective, community-based climate activism shape and imagine a more sustainable future.
The future has become a key focus in the social sciences, both as a research topic and as a space for political imagination and resistance. Since the climate crisis has moved into public consciousness, with movements like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion rising to prominence, questions about what a climate-just future looks like—and how it can be achieved—are now more urgent than ever. This book explores how different collective actors imagine and shape the future in the context of climate justice. It examines tensions between radical transformation, post-growth, and green modernization, as well as the contrasting ecological visions of left-wing and right-wing activism. Future imaginaries are presented not only as visions, but also as tools for action, shaping resistance, inspiring self-organization, and influencing strategies for sustainable change. Drawing on examples from grassroots climate movements, guerrilla gardening, ecovillages, and other forms of collective action, this volume offers one of the first comprehensive overviews of how imagined futures can guide political practice and societal transformation.
Table of Contents
• Introduction: Unruly Climates, Contested Futures – Antje Daniel, Frank Adloff, Junseo Hwang, Philipp Jacobi and Luis Poscharsky
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Part I: Thinking the Future
• The Future Being Shut Down: Ambiguities of Modernity and the Anthropocene – Jörn Ahrens
• Climate Heroism and Eco-Pessimism: Reactions to Catastrophe in Three Environmental Thinkers – Carl Cassegård
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Part II: Climate Activism: Imagining and Enacting the Future
• Active Imaginaries: Young Italians’ Prefiguration of the Future after Climate Change as Critical Thought – Enzo Colombo and Paola Rebughini
• Shifting Future Imaginaries and Evolving Protest in Climate Activism: An Algorithmically Assisted Visual Framing Analysis of Divergent (Self-)Representations – Johanna Raphaela Wahl
• Exploring a Culture of Active Hope: Ex-GKN for Future as a Working-Class Response to Job Loss and the Ecological Crisis – Julia Kaiser and Johanna Fankel
• Recursive Futures in the Crisis of the Present: Future Imaginaries and Prefigurative Politics within Forest Occupations in Germany – Alissa Starodub and Sebastian Garbe
• Uncommon Threads of a Common Weave: A Comparative Analysis of German and Japanese Climate Activism – Solange Annaik Commelin
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Part III: Shrinking Civic Spaces and Future Imaginaries from the Right
• Delegitimising Dissent: Framing of Climate Protests and Civil Disobedience – Siri Hummel
• ‘Counter-Apocalypse’ and the Politics of Future: Climate, Democracy, and the Closure of Political Horizons– Philipp Rhein
• The Ambivalent Future Ecological Imaginaries of the Far-Right: A Realist Perspective – Johannes Korak
• Utopia – Dystopia – Retrotopia: Temporality and Visions of the Future and the Radical Right’s Climate Discourse – Fabian Virchow
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Authors
• Authors