Anxiety, rage, frustration… and back again: Inquiring into the temporal dimensions of emotions in climate justice movements

Time is a critical part of political organising. Cycles of mobilisation and protest have been understood as circular, or dependent on contingent events and the timely seizing of opportunities by social movement organisations (SMOs). Yet the work of militancy also requires ongoing temporal care; contentious relations with established institutions are characterised by suspended temporalities, pauses and waiting – as well as surges of action and change. Finally, the imaginaries guiding political practice also rely on specific temporalities, ranging from a view of “revolution” as an event displaced in a future time to come when present contradictions are finally solved, to the “concrete utopias” of prefiguration that are firmly rooted in the present while also projecting towards the future. The imperatives of climate action and climate justice are rooted in this complex picture of time and temporality, but also involve deep transformations, including the urgency of enacting change in the present (e.g. the concept of “emergency”), the awareness of present damages extending to an unforeseen future, and the projection of justice temporalities towards generations and existences to come. We contribute to an emerging body of literature on climate politics and time through a specific focus on emotions in the temporalities of climate activism and organising. We focus on two dimensions: 1. Climate, emotions and imaginaries of transformation. How do the specific temporalities of climate change shape emotional responses to crisis? How is this leveraged by activists in movements to induce society-wide transformations? For instance, anxiety about the future can be mobilised to produce a sense of urgency in the present, but hope can also be instrumental to sustain practices and build collective horizons of mobilisation. 2. Emotions and the temporalities of climate action. How do emotions work to push subjects towards organising and collective action, sustain activist involvement, determine processes of exit and feelings of defeat? There is evidence that climate activists experience cycles of engagement that are shaped by specific emotions. For instance, anxiety is a potentially paralysing emotion, but can be turned into rage and produce engagement; frustration and fatigue might also induce climate activists to exit movements, then come back again. This would trace a circular temporality of political engagement: How do movements deal with this? And how does this shape their relation to institutions in the wider public and political sphere? Our paper’s general aim is to understand how the dimensions of time and emotions intersect in climate politics, both on the side of activist engagement and public discourse/mobilisation. We provide theoretical reflections and systematic review of substantive literature in the field of climate politics, emotions and temporalities. We will exemplify our conceptual approach by drawing on initial analyses of online communication materials by European climate movements using qualitative and quantitative sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP).