Visual Mobilisations Staging Desire for Nature-Human Relations and Political Resentment

Abstract

The panel theoretically and empirically discusses how activists, experts and artists use visual strategies of performance, visual storytelling visual framing in order to stage political positions and knowledge claims in contentious climate change debates in authoritarian and liberal democratic societies. The panel contributes to the new turn toward studying the visual dimension of political mobilization and the contentious and affective potential of visual forms of knowledge and political claims on climate change. It combines research using qualitative and computational methods with theories of democratic participation and inequality focusing on visual dynamics and art popularising political claims in virual and digital arenas of politics and protest. The paper by Anna Schober on climate change experts, elites and artistic stages for debate studies visually represented bodies and faces and the circulation of desire and hate compares case studies in Latin America to deliver a transnational comparative investigations of visual culture and art mobilised in relationg to the climate crisis: Visual arts have been targeted by climate activists (for example. Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion) who have thrown food at pictures in museums, and visual media are also by mainstream outlets to bring the expert opinions of climate researchers to the public, and visual arts are also being used as a stage to provoke debates on climate change, to present alternative perspectives and approaches to the mainstream, and to question existing attitudes. Schober’s theoretical and comparative account brings these three strands together to ask how visual media circulate both desire and mimetic imitation, as well as resentment and hatred, and how these dynamics relate to each other. Ceren Çevik uses visual and discourse analysis to examine images, videos, and textual posts from Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook by grassroots activist groups and ENGOs protesting large-scale infrastructure and extractive projects in Turkey leading to widespread environmental degradation and displacement, disproportionately affecting rural, indigenous, and low-income communities. Cevik explores how displacement is visually represented and discursively framed, contributing to theorize human-environment relations, environmental activism, climate mobility, and eco-resistance in semi-authoritarian contexts. Selen Sarıkaya Eren investigates artworks as a way to deepen analysis of contentious politics by focusing on the right cultural potential of visual storytelling and identity dynamics of contentious protests focusing on Turkey, from the Gezi Protests to the Saraçhane Protests. This article critically compares and analyzes the artworks produced and shared on social media by protestors, to explore how the practice is used to visualize the “self” and connect to “others”. Costanza Azzuppardi studies how climate justice activists effectively use social media in Italy, especially on Instagram, in response to the climate emergency. Cases of Extinction Rebellion (XR), Fridays for Future (FFF), and Ultima Generazione (UG) show how activists shape public perception of environmental degradation as a social emergency. By triangulating visual content analysis, visual qualitative analysis and interviews, findings demonstrate how the communication of climate justice in Italy has become deeply intertwined with non-violent civil disobedience.

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