Australian Anthropological Society Conference 2023 – Vulnerabilities – presentation
Hi all, I got the opportunity to present on my research at the recent 2023 AAS conference held at Macquarie University, Sydney, in the panel ‘Speculative vulnerabilities/vulnerable speculations: Rethinking economic forms by way of other worlds.‘ The text of my presentation ‘Solarpunk: pro-topian movement and community in potential?‘ is provided below.
Hi, I’m Ivy. I use she and her pronouns. And I would like to acknowledge the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi people on which I live and work, and the unceded lands of the Wallumattagal Clan of the Dharug Nation where we are meeting today. I would like to pay my respects to country and to the elders that hold cultural knowledge and have cared for this land for thousands of years and will continue to care for this land for thousands more. The nation of Australia is built upon ongoing illegal colonisation and genocide of land and peoples. We need to acknowledge and address that, and work with First Nations people to dismantle this colonial system, recognise Indigenous Sovereignty, and work together to care for country and people and non-human life.
Solarpunk is an emergent fiction genre, social movement, and community that has been growing since around 2010. It is focused on responding to climate change and dystopian thinking, drawing on a diversity of experiences and cultural knowledges as well as developments in technology to think through how our futures could be different – and much more liveable for all.
My current research is a digital ethnography drawing on a bricolage of digital and traditional ethnographic methods woven together to engage with solarpunk as an important and timely phenomenon responding to our current issues that is distributed globally and connected through multiple online technologies simultaneously.
Solarpunk & Radical Imagination
A core thread through my current work on solarpunk is the importance of radical imagination and the ways that art and fictional stories can sketch out the parameters and ideals of alternative utopian or pro-topian futures that are relatable on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one.
Khasnabish and Haiven define the radical imagination as:
“the ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be … to build solidarity across boundaries and borders … [to] create, with those around us, multiple, overlapping, contradictory and coexistent imaginary landscapes, horizons of common possibility and shared understanding” (Khasnabish & Haiven 2014, p.3-4)
This links in with a long history of political and academic work on the mobilising power of utopia, and a reignited interest in utopian futures following a long period of widespread disillusionment with the utopian project since the mid-20th century. The concept of utopia is heavily critiqued by solarpunks, with many preferring to speak of building pro-topias – worlds that are not perfect or static, but achievably better than our current world and always in the process of improving. Nevertheless, solarpunks argue that utopian ideals are a powerful tool in the face of late-capitalist climate-collapse.
Echoing the work of Benedict Anderson on printing presses and the ways that mass distributed media fostered the development of a sense of belonging in an imagined shared national community, solarpunk art and fiction as texts provide a tool for both exploring alternative futures as well as encapsulating solarpunk values and aesthetics in a form that can be widely shared so that people can engage with them wherever they are in the world, thus opening up opportunities for new people to learn about solarpunk and potentially grow to identify as part of a loosely-networked community of solarpunks. This is one of the ways that solarpunk aims to influence social change and slowly shift our shared world onto a more utopian trajectory.
Solarpunk & Utopia
She is on the horizon.
I walk two steps, she moves two steps away.
I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further.
As much as I walk, I will never reach her.
For what does utopia serve? It serves for this, to walk.
Eduardo Galeano, Window on Utopia
As stated by one of my interlocutors:
“I know ideals they are not to be made real completely, they are to walk there. There is a beautiful writing from the poet Eduardo Galeano, he wrote something like ‘utopia is in front of me. I walk ten steps forward, and she goes ten steps forward too. I walk more forward to her, and she walks the same amount forward too. So, if I never get there, what is utopia for? It’s not to get there. It’s to move forward. It is a moving target. And that is solarpunk. I know I’m probably not gonna live in a solarpunk society. But I can strive to go there. It helps as a vision. And maybe actually I can live a bit of it. But if not, my kids will live a little bit of it too, a bit more, and maybe their kids. It’s a vision that inspires us to go forward for something that we believe is better.” (Roberto, he/him)
Roberto here encapsulates a core aspect of solarpunk utopian visioning: utopia serves as an ever-moving target that inspires us to continually strive to make our world better while allowing space to appreciate and work on pro-topian – better but not perfect – worlds in the present and near future.
Solarpunk Hope as Active
At the same time, linking this with the conditions of our contemporary world requires that hope to become an active practice rather an empty wishing for a utopia completely disconnected from the real world. As another solarpunk states:
“I think of hope as active, [rather than] just hoping that things will get better … every time I write a solarpunk story, I go into this deep rabbit hole of research about some awful environmental issue. And then I try to reframe that and figure out ways that we can move forward from that. … you can go into a deep depression over it. It’s so easy to lose hope. So it is this really active process for me to not be devastated by it and to instead find ways forward. … It’s an active imagination that doesn’t say, no, this doesn’t exist or it’s not so bad or whatever. It says, yes, this is horrible. Now what do we do. … it’s great to do these thought experiments and really imaginative stories and artworks … But if it all stays fiction, then we failed.” (Natasha, she/her)
This illustrates that solarpunks aim to move beyond just being a fiction genre, or art movement. Like the radical activists studied by Khasnabish and Haiven, solarpunk is a loosely networked community of people that are trying to find ways to enact positive social and environmental change in the material offline world, not just in the realm of imagination.
Solarpunk as Community
The concept of community is rendered complex and partial given that solarpunks do not share a single geographical region or cultural identity, nor are they embedded in material networks of exchange and support. This complexity is shared by the majority of online communities that develop a shared identity through coming together in online “cyber” spaces rather than distinct physical places. Solarpunks form overlapping communities through different social media platforms as well as through sharing art and fiction and shared understandings of key solarpunk values & principles.
“I do see myself as part of the solarpunk community, but it’s also hard, because I don’t actually interact a lot with people in the community. … I want there to be more things that actually make me feel more connected to people.” (Luka, they/them)
Some solarpunks are part of specific groups online and offline that explicitly engage with solarpunk imaginings and ideologically aligned practices, such as the solarpunk collective Commando Jugendstil. Other solarpunks are more geographically and socially isolated from other like-minded people and rely on shared principles and occasional online interaction to foster a sense of belonging in a widely dispersed community of solarpunks.
Online platforms can provide the foundation for meaningful community connections just as much as offline physical community spaces and interactions, and there is much overlap between the online and offline world. At the same time, solarpunk can be conceptualised as an “imagined” community a la Benedict Anderson, in that individuals develop a sense of belonging and connection with an abstracted global solarpunk community through shared texts, beliefs, practices, aesthetics, and goals.
Solarpunk as Movement
So to what extent is solarpunk a movement in the political or activist sense? Solarpunk is quite young as a community and label and has substantial overlap with a range of movements and subcultural groups that seek to address social and environmental justice issues. many of the solarpunks I interviewed throughout my fieldwork argued that it is productive to think of solarpunk as a “movement in potential”. To draw on a handful of quotes that exemplify this:
“It could just become another social media aesthetic. But I also think it has the potential to be more than just that. I think it could really inspire people to not just imagine the world as being other than what it is, but also lead them into action to actively push it in that direction. To not just imagine the world as different as a form of mental comfort food, but to get out there and start doing things to transform it.” (Colin, he/him)
“I think it has potential for being a movement. I’m not sure if it’s quite bridging that gap. But at the same time we’re seeing people who identify with solarpunk going out and joining other community organizations, community projects, and just doing good in their community. I think that is a very useful way to engage with solarpunk ideals and philosophy in a real-world setting. … When talking about solarpunk and what that looks like in a real-world setting, like, in the US marching in a Black Lives Matter protest is solarpunk. You are enacting solarpunk ideals when you do that. Whether it’s putting your body in a place like that, or doing different initiatives to contribute in your community, is a way that solarpunk does become a realized movement.” (Erin, she/her)
So, Solarpunk principles serve as a motivation for real-world action supporting different campaigns to improve the lives of people around us and our shared future. And solarpunk radical imagining can serve as a tool for different groups and movements to co-create visions of the future worlds they are working to bring into reality. These two key aspects of solarpunk work to bring people together, shape their community and campaigning practices, and sustain hope and motivation in the face of widespread ecological collapse and runaway capitalism.
As argued by Khasnabish and Haiven and many others, working together towards something, rather than just fighting against a seemingly overwhelming tide of problems, can be a very powerful thing. It also opens up the horizons of imagination beyond what seems possible within the current status quo. As the solarpunks I interviewed argue and as I have outlined here, step one is engaging with radical imagination to widen the possibilities for the future, showing that there is indeed an alternative to late-capitalist ecological collapse dystopia and that people are fighting to make this alternative a reality. Step two is grabbing hold of the hope and inspiration sparked by radical utopian visions and harnessing them to try and make a positive impact in the material world and our shared social reality. These two steps are of course not merely sequential, but implemented in an iterative feedback relationship where each informs and drives the other.
Ultimately, solarpunk manifests as an assemblage of ideas and practices which can be used to collaboratively envision more positive futures, and actions to bring these futures into reality. Solarpunk offers a community and label for people to come together to not only share deep dives into the overlapping crises of our current world, but also to share ideals and visions and suggestions for ways to make the world more “solarpunk”, and to share news about positive projects and developments from around the world where people are mobilising and successfully making positive change. No matter how dire and hopeless things may seem, there is always the possibility of doing things differently at whatever scale the opportunity arises.
To return to Eduardo Galeano’s Window on Utopia: a solarpunk future is not a destination to arrive at, but a goal to continually strive towards as well as an evocation of principles to live by while on the journey.
