Exploring speculative climate justice futures with creative methods
Blog content
Miranda Iossifidis, Mack Sproates and Bethan
At the “Failed Again: The Fault-lines in Utopia” workshop in September 2024, Mack Sproates, Bethan and myself presented our project, ‘Exploring Speculative Climate Justice Futures with Creative Methods’. The project emerged from a desire to explore the possibility of creating methodological approaches that allow for the co-production of alternative climate justice presents and futures rooted in collective action, in a context of growing climate anxiety and mainstreaming of reactionary environmental ideas. Our perspectives are coming from abolitionist approaches and intertwined justice movements.
We held four workshops, which took place in Spring and Summer 2024, which drew on creative methods and speculative fiction, and included participant-led discussion, envisioning, and collage-making to make zines, emphasising the collective production of practical and speculative knowledge. Each session included sharing, envisioning, making, and conversation. We wanted to build a friendly and un-competitive atmosphere of discussing and sharing of experiences, knowledges, histories, and practices. We discussed historical and current movements, speculative fiction, our own everyday practices, hopes, desires, and fears.
The collective zine Care, Temporality, Justice is based on four speculative climate futures zine workshops that took place at the NewBridge Project and online. The specific themes explored in each workshop were decided collectively by the group itself, in the workshops and in-between sessions using an online collaborative tool. These themes included care, temporality, justice, how we get there, and “what if”. The workshops were co-facilitated by Miranda Iossifidis (she/her, sociologist), Bethan (they/them, youth worker with an envisioning practice), and Mack Sproates (they/he, artist, facilitator and zine-maker), together with the workshop participants. The sharing was led by Miranda, the envisioning exercises were devised and led by Bethan, making sessions by Mack, and collective discussions were led by participants, using our zine creations as the basis for conversations.
This zine is made by the Speculative Climate Futures zine workshop folks, including Ansh Meeta, Francesca DiGiorgio, Jim Kaufman, Shevek Fodor & Sophie Buxton. The beautiful cover, paintings and zine layout are by Mack.
We think that zine-making allow us to engage with the more-than-spoken, to include materials, memories and emotions. So, maybe these speculative climate future zine-making sessions can be considered collective experiments in the radical imagination, understood as ‘constitutive, collective feature of daily life and is decidedly unspectacular in the way it manifests’ (Khasnabish, 2020). In the zine itself we included the envisioning and zine-making exercises alongside the work we made in the workshops, so you (the reader) can do it yourself.
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Some reflections shared at the “Failed Again: The Fault-lines in Utopia” workshop, Newcastle University 12/09/24
The Role of Zine-Making
Mack: As a non-academic person working with zine making in universities and with community groups I’ve found this to be a really fulfilling, purposeful role. I’ve been able to learn a lot about people’s experiences first hand and be a part of groups and conversations that I may not usually - and help to hold a space for them to talk about things they are passionate about. Zines have been a great form of activism as they can platform people’s voices who are not usually heard.
Zine making is such a helpful tool when it comes to radical imagining and climate utopias as you get a very personable, raw and honest response - one which hasn’t gone through a publishing company or censoring. It can come from just one individual or a collective’s imagination and it can feel more down to earth, accessible and can communicate ideas quickly, visually and emotionally. This means as a reader you can also think creatively about how you might respond to the themes and it is a great way of gathering, sharing, and learning from each other as a community. They are a way of opening conversations, breaking down barriers and advocating for positive change.
Miranda: Embracing the snail – a figure that emerged from one participant’s creative and activist practice – was important in the workshops, and the generosity of the discussions we had, coming from different perspectives, was grounded in the desire for community learning. Honouring everyone’s experience and knowledge from being involved in different campaigns and movements such as migrant justice, youth climate strike, disability justice, Palestine solidarity, youth work, community arts, and learning from each other.
Utopia, Failure and Imagination
Bethan: With the envisioning practice, I tried to create threads throughout the workshops that allowed participants to build on their visions of a utopian climate future. We also made sure to have discussions after every envisioning exercise to bring our ideas into focus, and to highlight the collective imagination. Those discussions were some of my favourite parts of the workshops as we all made connections between the things that we were thinking and what emotions we were feeling about our ideal climate futures. One of the key themes that were shared by multiple people across the different workshops were about temporality - slowing down and resting and I think this is in direct conflict with how we currently exist and navigate the societal hegemony of consumption thinking. This was particularly interesting as sometimes there wasn’t a cross over of participants who came to the sessions, and the place in which we had our workshops felt conducive to creating the kind of futures we were imagining.
Using imagination as a tool can be difficult to keep grounded as it’s an unutilised skill in neoliberal capitalist society so it can feel overwhelming and difficult to tangibly grasp. I learned this from a collective imagination workshop I participated in a few years ago and continue to use it because it’s useful - asking people to focus on their senses such as taste, smell and touch can make imagining easier and it creates a connection between yourself and the thing that you are imagining. I like to start with the micro - the individual, your neighbourhood, your family, then move to the macro - nationally, internationally.
Radical imagination is a doing word - a powerful tool of resistance. When asking people to be in a vulnerable state to imagine such hopeful futures it can be very personal and often rooted in trauma and your own relationship with our current ways of being. For example, a lot of what I want to see in a utopian future is based on past personal experiences as somebody who is neurodiverse and my relationship with class and gender, while also holding space for an eradication of the violence and harm that I am not subject to myself through abolition and anti-colonialism practices. I was aware that whatever questions I asked held a lot of power, as the answers to those would take form in the making through ideas on the page. I had to contend with this, so I tried to also give space to people asking questions of themselves and of each other through groups discussions.
I think that failure is built into imagination, there can be a deep yearning that comes with envisioning exercises, and you have to be careful to hold that with care otherwise that can lead to feelings of hopelessness rather than hope. Sometimes it can feel like a failure that we aren’t there yet, bringing forth feelings of grief. On reflection, failure isn’t a bad thing, not something that we should be scared of. By trade, I’m a youth worker and this comes with a lot of dynamic changing of plans and I think that means I naturally lean into believing that it’s not a failure to have to change course and leave behind ideas that you were once deeply connected to. One person’s utopia is another person’s oppression so having to change how we view our ideal climate futures based on the collective is not a failure of our own singular imagination, it’s a strength to radically build a utopia that is liberated and just.
To read/download the zine and some of the resources that we discussed in the making of it, visit https://climatefutures.cc/ and please feel free to get in touch if you’d like a physical copy or to chat about the project: miranda.iossifidis@ncl.ac.uk