Amplifying Solidarity in The Anthropocene: Public Engagement for Hope in Dialogic Organizing

Abstract

In this paper, through the analysis of ethnographic accounts of citizens engagement events, we will explore manners in which experiences with the momentous impacts of the Anthropocene has given way to calls for new ways of organizing our lives. These engagement events were organized in Vietnam and UK with the purpose of presenting the concept of the Anthropocene, its stakes and its effects; taking into account the participants impressions and everyday experiences; and contemplating and discussing alternative forms of business models less detrimental to/impactful on the environment and the Earth System. A common theme emerging in these workshops was that of doing something in a form of solidarity: a commitment to the idea that we owe it to ourselves and others to unite in new ways, to act and organize differently, forgoing what we already have and do, redressing, reinventing and reconfiguring, for the sake of an (ever) emerging “we” that cuts across the borders of time and space and species that we usually identify ourselves by. We investigate specifically the impetus for the questions most frequently posed by the participants of the ethnographic work: what can we do as engaged citizens, how to become active together, and in which ways is it possible to hope for a future in this new geological time unit of the Anthropocene. In the paper, we theorise two of the features to the Anthropocene Experience: the practical question of when and where and, especially, on which scale to begin reorganizing our ways of living when apprehending the Anthropocene ramifications — which we will show some features of in the narrative account concerning the citizens engagement events; and how the responses to the Anthropocene challenges are motivated when people begin to consider them together. Our paper contributes, in the first instance, to the body of work on the grassroots movements and forms of activism in different spaces of hope and to theorise the concept of solidarity