“Everyday Activism in Times of Collapse: Bridging the Personal and the Planetary” — Chris Julien (UU)

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1830-32.

What does it mean to live among the collapse of Holocene climate and ecosystems – whose stable state enabled the emergence of life as we know it over the past 10.000 years? We are witnessing dramatic, material shifts in the Earth’s system, but these are also a fundamental “vibe shift” for modern societies that challenge dominant epistemologies.

Interdisciplinary geographer Farhana Sultana points out how these shifts are by no means uniform. Rather, “the confluence of local power imbalances, uneven creation of vulnerabilities and production of risks end up merging global climate breakdown with scalar intersectional factors from the planetary to the body, thereby creating more complex tapestries of outcomes in different contexts” (Sultana 2022, 5-6). This renders environmental collapse as a mosaic of complex and situated phenomena, raising a challenge for response-able thinking about how to situate ourselves within this shared but differentiated space. As one among many, I propose to work through our involvement in this planetary context according to our everyday capacities for system change, as discussed in my recent book Alledaags Activisme (Everyday Activism) published by Podium in 2024.

Christopher F. Julien (he/they) is an activist and researcher based in Zaandam, the Netherlands. His PhD research at Utrecht University focuses on new materialisms and decolonial ecology, aiming to develop techniques for ecological governance. He is active in, and a spokesperson for, Extinction Rebellion NL, and has an independent practice connecting the arts with ecology and climate. He has published in MATTER: Journal for New Materialist Research, The More Posthuman Glossary, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy and in Worlding Ecologies, as well as the popular non-fiction book ‘Alledaags activisme‘ with Podium Uitgevers. He holds cum laude Masters degrees in Cultural Analysis and in Conflict Studies & Human Rights.

You can register for this seminar here. This session is part of the Transmission in Motion seminar (2024-2025): “Implicatedness” To stay updated with more seminar sessions, please subscribe to our newsletter.