Description

We now live in global spaces where climate change is transforming life on earth. One of the crucial cultural spaces where the imaginations of our climate change futures play out is the public sphere. One of the reasons identified for why we have reached a climate change impasse—the disparity between the scale of the crisis and our cultural and political action—is because of a declined and deadlocked public sphere: one that because of the intrusion of the market and limiting neoliberal policies has lost any potential to influence the actual exercise of power and actual governance on policy issues such as climate change.

In this presentation Dr Angi Buettner will discuss the SchoolStrike4Climate movement as an emerging heterotopia: a space in which local and global groups create and enact alternative stories of how we can live on the earth. Dr Buettner will identify the imaginations behind such collective spaces in current climate change activism, with a focus on the public sphere as an array of discursive, cultural and performative spaces to interrupt the dominant spaces, practices and policies. The purpose of this case study is to examine the potential power of the public sphere as heterotopia when it comes to climate change governance.