Abstract
In December 2015 the United Nations held its 21st climate change conference (COP21) in Paris. While political leaders convened to negotiate a new climate treaty, a diverse landscape of social movements, grassroots organizations, activists and artists assembled to mobilize public support for climate justice. In this paper we draw attention to one example of such non-traditional climate mobilization: Run for Your Life, organized by the Swedish theatre company Riksteatern. Framed as a ‘climate performance’, this initiative enrolled thousands of people to run distances in a relay race for climate justice, starting in Arctic Sweden and arriving in Paris on the first day of COP21. Public events were organized along the way, and the entire race was video recorded and broadcasted online. When signing up, runners were asked to submit their own climate story. Drawing on this archive of personal stories, we examine how Run for Your Life mobilized citizen engagement for climate justice. By paying attention to the multiple ways in which climate change is storied into people’s lives, we seek to understand why citizens decide to take climate action and which subject positions are available to them in the broader environmental drama. While the scripting of climate change as a planetary emergency perpetuated by global injustices serves an important function in the politics of climate change, we argue that it is in situated stories of environmental connection that climate change gains personal meaning. Here, kinship and solidarity are articulated, opening up for progressive social change.
Highlights
Snow is falling through dimmed winter light
In this paper we examine Run for Your Life as a political event that combined elements of art and activism to mobilize citizen engagement with climate change through personal stories, physical movement and suggestive mass communication
By placing the participating subjects’ active interventions at the center of the work’s meaning, RFYL turned into an experimental site where multiple expressions of climate concern and subjectivity were brought to the fore. We argue, it provides an interesting public scene for scholars interested in environmental story-telling and citizenship
Summary
Snow is falling through dimmed winter light. A young woman walks toward the viewer. “Take a stone in your hand,” she says, “and close your fist around it until it starts to beat, live, speak and move”; a quote from a poem by the Sámi poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää Her gaze is intense as she tells the viewer about herself and her struggle, as an artist, activist, mother, companion and human being, to defend Sámi culture and Mother Earth against the threat of climate change. This literature asks how environmental subjectivities are shaped by the physical, social, and cultural environments that we inhabit, and what forms of political agency these attachments engender Against this backdrop, we analyze how RFYL was staged as a climate performance in the months prior to the UN climate conference in Paris and what political narratives and subjectivities that informed its FIGURE 1 | Jenni Laiti and other participants at the start of run for Your Life. We argue, it is through the situated stories and lived experiences of a changing climate that progressive social change is most likely to take meaning and form
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