Movement pedagogies in pandemic times: Extinction Rebellion Netherlands and (un)learning from the margins

ABSTRACT

This article is based on activist research conducted alongside Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. By taking a pedagogical approach to social movements, it posits that Extinction Rebellion Netherlands is simultaneously bound up in the reproduction of and resistance to dominant ways of knowing and being. It discusses how ‘pedagogies of urgency’ reproduce the learning of hegemonic forms of life associated with modernity/coloniality. Treating the movement's margins as a privileged space of epistemological possibility, it examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted who is ‘heard, seen and rendered knowing’ [Motta & Esteves. (2014). Reinventing emancipation in the 21st century: The pedagogical practices of social movements. Interface, 6(1), 1–24, p. 5)]. This has facilitated the unlearning of pedagogies of urgency, and the learning of new relationships, subjectivities and knowledges that centre justice, prefiguration, and building relations across difference. Nevertheless, the pandemic also underscores some of the impossibilities for learning and dialogue inherent in the exclusions and violence at the heart of modern/colonial power relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Extinction Rebellion
• social movements
• pedagogies
• COVID-19
• climate justice
• modernity/coloniality

Introduction

In 2018 and 2019, mass mobilization for climate action in Europe reached a momentum unparalleled in previous years. This was driven in part by the emergence of two mass movements: Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion.¹ This momentum was severely disrupted in early 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic, which limited the possibilities for mass mobilization and diverted public attention and resources. Yet, when we understand the pandemic, not as an ‘event’ or ‘crisis’, but as just one more materialization of intertwined ecological, racial, and gendered violence that sustains the colonial capitalist system, it only renders the struggles for climate and ecological justice more pressing. I am hesitant to claim that these mass mobilizations are of particular relevance, given that the struggle in defence of life and land has at least a 500-year history (see, e.g. Gilio-Whitaker, 2019; LaDuke, 1999) that risks being erased when we centre European-based forms of struggle that easily insert themselves into modern/colonial² knowledge systems. Even so, I believe that these struggles bear scholarly attention. In the midst of climate and ecological collapse, how can mass mobilization originating in the regions most responsible for socio-ecological suffering contribute to collective projects of global justice and to healing our relations to earth and each other?

This article examines some of the impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on one of these movements, Extinction Rebellion, in The Netherlands. The Netherlands is situated at the heart of modern/colonial power structures as a colonizer country and a major node in extractive agricultural industries like palm oil, soy, and cocoa. At the same time, it is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels as a result of climate change. This makes it a striking point of departure to study resistance to intersecting systems of ecological, colonial, and economic exploitation. In particular, the article focuses on ‘pedagogies of urgency’ within Extinction Rebellion Netherlands, to illustrate how dominant ways of knowing and being are learned and reinforced within the movement. It argues that by shifting who is ‘heard, seen and rendered knowing’ (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 5), the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated the emergence of counter-hegemonic pedagogies existing at the movement's (epistemological) margins. These pedagogies aid the unlearning of pedagogies of urgency and the learning of new relationships, subjectivities and knowledges that centre justice, prefiguration, and care for the earth and each other.

Extinction Rebellion was founded in the United Kingdom in 2018, and defines itself as a movement that uses non-violent mass civil disobedience to ‘halt mass extinction and minimize the risk of social collapse’ (Extinction Rebellion Global, 2020) resulting from the climate and ecological emergency.³ Extinction Rebellion Netherlands (XRNL) was one of the first national XR chapters outside the UK, founded in December 2018. Since then, the movement has spread rapidly across the globe, establishing chapters in more than 70 countries at the time of writing. This is largely due to the high level of autonomy and replicability of the movement: as long as its ten core principles and values (Extinction Rebellion Global, 2020) are respected, anyone can take action in the name of Extinction Rebellion. Since its inception, XR has been extensively criticized in the UK as well as in the Netherlands for its predominantly white, middle-class movement base, its apolitical positioning as being ‘beyond politics’, and lack of attention to (neo)colonialism and capitalism as the root causes of the climate and ecological crises.⁴ While these important critiques have informed much of my thinking about the movement, I take seriously Sara Motta's (2016) call to ‘decolonise critique’: to not only deconstruct dominant ways of knowing and being, but to simultaneously engage in the affirmative ‘co-construction of becoming otherwise⁵ to [the colonisers’ logics] as communities and subjects’ (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 5).

Therefore, this article draws from literature on social movement pedagogies to demonstrate the ways in which XRNL is simultaneously engaged in the reproduction of and resistance to hegemonic ways of knowing and being. It aims to shed light on how these dynamics may co-exist, and how pedagogies at the margins of social movements may come to inform their politics and praxis. In this way, it seeks to further the understanding of how movements in the Global North may contribute to unsettling dominant relations of power and fostering climate and ecological justice. Concurrently, this article demonstrates how these possibilities are simultaneously elusive, given some of the impossibilities and incommensurabilities that result from XRNL's embeddedness in modern/colonial power structures.

In the next section, I briefly discuss the research on which this article is based and the methodology used. Then, I turn to a discussion of pedagogies of urgency in XRNL, illustrating how they reinforce dominant ways of knowing and being in the movement. Finally, I explore how, over the course of 2020, XRNL gradually shifted towards centring knowledge-practices that emphasize social justice, prefiguration, care, and building relations across difference. I discuss the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in facilitating this transformation, as it opened up spaces for dialogue and (un)learning with the movement's margins.

Methodology

I first became involved in XRNL in February 2019 in the context of my MA dissertation research at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague. Departing from a concern with some of the (epistemological) absences and erasures around race, colonialism, and human-nature relations in the Dutch climate movement in general and Extinction Rebellion in particular, my research focused on how dominant knowledges and subjectivities are reinforced and resisted in XRNL. This article is based on activist research conducted between April and October 2019, during a time when XRNL was only just getting started. It included fifteen interviews with XRNL organizers across different national circles⁶ and local groups. The interviews covered their understanding of XRNL's knowledges and practices and their views on whose voices and bodies are welcomed and centred in the movement. I took a deliberate activist research approach that combines political action and reflexive activist scholarship (Hale, 2001), collapsing the subject-object divide that separates academia from social movements. By interweaving the stories of other activists with the ‘activist knowledges’ gained from my everyday being and resisting with XRNL, I challenged the boundaries between activist and academic knowledges (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008). Thus, my own embodied knowledge of (un)learning with the movement between February 2019 and October 2020 is an important additional source for this research, drawing from hundreds of documents, talks, trainings, actions, meetings, and other experiences.

During the initial phase of the research, an apparent tension continued to surface between the urgency of the climate and ecological crises, and a justice-based approach that constructs climate change as a product of the colonial capitalist patriarchal system and/or inextricably intertwined with social justice struggles against racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism, and colonialism. The tension often surfaced in the movement as a discussion regarding to what extent XRNL should address ‘other issues’ than the climate and ecological crises (e.g. racism, labour struggles) and collaborate with other social movements. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded across Europe, it offered new insights into these tensions. In the meantime, I observed how the movement itself developed, learned, and transformed, as social and climate justice became increasingly central to its politics, knowledges, and praxis. In October 2020, I conducted four additional interviews with key organizers of the latest period of mobilization and direct action in September. I aimed to gain a better understanding of how they interpreted these changes, and how these related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

By focussing my research on XRNL, I am mostly highlighting the stories and experiences of people that are in many ways in a privileged position, and fit relatively comfortably within the climate and environmental movement and Dutch society. I am aware that I risk further silencing the voices that are not represented or that are marginalized in the movement. My research is inevitably conditioned by a gaze from within the dominant culture in The Netherlands and environmental activism, being white, middle-class, and having received an academic education. At the same time, it also seeks to disobey and disrupt normative power structures by listening to decolonial and feminist scholars, and activists. As an organizer, I have been mainly working on anti-oppression in XRNL through my engagement in the national Inclusion & Power circle, which focuses on centring climate justice, anti-oppression, and mitigating power in XRNL's practices and narratives. Like all knowledge, my perspectives are necessarily partial and socially situated, and shaped by this particular positionality and politics: seeking to understand and undo power relations – and my own implications in them – of white supremacy, patriarchy and modernity/coloniality from within XRNL.

Social movement pedagogies

This article contributes to a growing body of literature that brings together social movement studies with critical analyses of the politics of knowledge, emerging from a variety of traditions including decolonial, feminist, and post-structuralist thinking. I depart from the proposition that the epistemic challenges of social movements need to be taken seriously (Icaza & Vazquez, 2013), understanding social movements as spaces where ‘the knowledges and agencies needed to change the world […] are being incubated’ (Conway, 2004, p. 239). Social movements have increasingly been recognized as producers of what Casas-Cortés et al. (2008) call ‘knowledge-practices’, knowledges that are embodied, lived and situated and define our ‘ways of inhabiting and creating the world and each other’ (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 4). An emphasis on the knowledge-practices of social movements not only invites us to resist claims to totalizing, universal knowledges, but also foregrounds the political significance of knowledges, practices, and subjectivities that often go under the radar of what traditionality constitutes the political field in social movement studies (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008).

What these analytical approaches do not however account for, is how social movements may simultaneously be bound up in replicating the dominant logics of capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. By centring pedagogies, Motta and Esteves (2014) demonstrate that the transformative or counter-hegemonic potential of social movements is not a given, as movement pedagogies may serve to reproduce the ‘coloniser's logic’. They argue that the counter-hegemonic pedagogical practices of social movements have two moments:

… one to deconstruct and rupture dominant pedagogies of epistemological and ontological denial by appearing as knowing-subjects. The other moment is the affirmative co-construction of becoming otherwise to these logics as communities and subjects. (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 5)

Instead of approaching social movements as epistemic struggles or knowledge producers, I draw from pedagogical approaches to argue that movement pedagogies in XRNL may serve to both reproduce normative or dominant relations of power as well as facilitate ‘unlearning social relationships, subjectivities and ways of life and learning new ones’ (Motta, 2016, p. 40). Rather than a singular entity operating by a unified logic – as suggested by structuralist as well as ‘cultural turn’ social movement scholars (e.g. Benford & Snow, 2000; Melucci, 1996; Tarrow & Tilly, 2007) – XRNL is better understood as a self-organizing, heterogeneous ‘meshwork’ (Escobar, 2008, p. 272). It is continuously subject to (re)construction through operations of power that transform and reshape the movement and its pedagogies.

Drawing on the work of bell hooks (1990), Motta and Esteves (2014) identify the non-subjects of contemporary capitalism at the margins of social movements as occupying ‘a privileged space of epistemological possibility’ (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 8). Especially in reference to North American (see Luchies, 2014) – and I would add European – movements, they argue that movement praxis that centres and makes visible the movement's (epistemological) margins harbours emancipatory pedagogical possibilities that facilitate the unlearning of dominant pedagogies. As I will demonstrate in this article, this means that social movements do not merely function as pedagogical ‘spaces’ where subjects engage in (un)learning or knowledge production. Movements themselves are continually subject to transformation as movement mainstreams encounter its multiple margins, reconfiguring which knowledge-practices are deemed legitimate, who is heard and who is silenced. In this case, the COVID-19 pandemic emerges as a particular catalyst that provoked movement (un)learning of capitalism's dominant logics. However, this will not result in emancipatory, counter-hegemonic possibilities if it does not translate into the learning of subjectivities, relationships and ways of life other to these logics; and a restructuring of whose bodies, politics and epistemologies can belong to the movement.

Pedagogies of urgency in Extinction Rebellion Netherlands

Before examining more closely how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted XRNL's pedagogies and politics of knowledge, I will discuss what I describe as XRNL's ‘pedagogies of urgency’ as one example of pedagogies in XRNL that reinforce the dominant logics of colonial capitalism. ‘Urgency’ emerged throughout my interviews, interactions, and experiences as producing particular tensions with knowledge-practices focused on justice, prefiguration, collaboration, and care. It bears mentioning that ‘pedagogies of urgency’ are not clearly delineated, but instead refer to a loosely related set of practices, knowledges, relationships, and subjectivities characterized by a concern for urgency, that are pedagogical in the sense that they reproduce the learning of hegemonic forms of life (Motta & Esteves, 2014). Understanding urgency as not merely a frame or narrative, but as pedagogy helps us understand how it intervenes in relations of power within the movement. In this way, it structures whose voices are rendered knowing, whose bodies are constructed as belonging, and whose lives are constructed as having value and deserving to be defended.

The very name ‘Extinction Rebellion’, the emergency language widely used by the movement and its invoked imaginaries of ‘everybody gone forever’ on flyers and posters – often accompanied by drawings of human and animal skeletons and bones – are intended as a wake-up call to the urgency of the climate and ecological crises. Especially in the first year of the movement's existence, regular talks titled ‘Heading for Extinction and What To Do About It’ were the most important tool for attracting and mobilizing new members. Like most of the early knowledge-practices of XRNL, these talks were adapted from Extinction Rebellion UK. They draw on the latest natural scientific insights to ‘tell the truth’ about the urgency of the climate and ecological emergency. They aim to tap into the audience's emotional response, and spur them into action by presenting XR's theory of change – mass non-violent civil disobedience. As one of my interviewees, James,⁷ put it:

That's why it's good to have these talks that we do, even if it's ten people. […] That's all we’ve got to do, get more people thinking about it, because as soon as they think about it, unless they revert to kidding themselves, they’ll be forced to acknowledge the truth and realise they have to act too.

‘The talk’ – as it is commonly referred to within XR – thus served as an important pedagogical tool to reframe the climate crisis and ecological destruction as a matter of extinction and communicate the urgency for change. This urgency for change is mainly imagined as extinction located in humanity's future, as well as present and past extinction of non-human lives and species – biodiversity loss. This Eurocentric representation of ‘the truth’ erases past and present impacts of climate change and ecological collapse on people living (predominantly) in the Global South, and increasingly on marginalized communities in the Global North.⁸ In addition, by presenting climate change and ecological destruction as a recent crisis, removed from the interlocking systems of oppression that produced it, the violence and constant state of ‘crises’ of coloniality as the ‘underside’ of modernity (Dussel, 1996) are denied. This raises painful questions regarding whose lives need to be on the line in order for climate change to be labelled an ‘emergency’. The extinction narrative makes an appeal to a common humanity threatened by extinction which does not in fact exist, replicating the dehumanization of the racialized ‘other’. The pedagogy of urgency thus promises the preservation of an imagined future, predicated on the denial of the radically uneven distribution of gendered, racialized, and ecological violence that sustain the modern/colonial world (Langstaff, 2016). In this way, it reinforces modern/colonial power structures that universalize the experiences of the white European subject and actively renders other worlds and ways of being non-existent (Escobar, 2016).

Beyond reproducing dominant representations of climate change and ecological collapse that centre the white European subject, pedagogies of urgency also shapes rebels’⁹ subjectivities. In the first phase of my research in the summer of 2019, vulnerability – of oneself or one's close kin – to the climate and ecological crises emerged as an important theme. In several interviews and informal conversations, rebels explained how they had come to understand themselves as vulnerable in relation to climate and ecological collapse, either through their direct experience of intensifying extreme weather patterns or by learning more about the consequences of climate change. It was often one of their main motivations for joining the movement and taking action. On the one hand, vulnerability disrupts dominant discourses of European exceptionalism that construct climate change as temporally and geographically removed from European realities (Doyle, 2011). It also provides opportunities for the unlearning of modern/colonial subjectivities founded on individuality, separation, and mastery over the environment. Scholars writing on ecological grief and multispecies relationality have thus suggested that vulnerability can foster the learning of subjectivities founded on dependency, uncertainty, and an absence of control (Head, 2016; Verlie, 2019).

However, when the experience of vulnerability is closely linked to the urgency to take action, it risks reinforcing modern desires for control and domination, and reproducing exclusionary ways of being and relating. The COVID-19 pandemic underlines this. Similar to the climate and ecological crises, it has been in particular those ‘who occupy an assemblage of relative health-wealth securities’ – inextricably bound up with whiteness, nationality, class, ability, and gender – ‘[who] are shocked to be confronted by the threat of untimely mortality and associated ontological insecurity’ during the pandemic (Maddrell, 2020, p. 108). Rebels’ ‘discovery’ of their vulnerability and the anxiety this provokes speaks to the relative position of security that most of them are in, while the most severe vulnerabilities to both the pandemic and the climate and ecological crises are located outside of Europe. Under these circumstances, perceptions of vulnerability easily translate into reflexes to re-establish domination and control, as can be noted in the majority of responses to the pandemic, including emergency and warlike narratives that are not unlike those used by XR. This points to the need for pedagogies that make possible other ways of being and relating not rooted in an urgency to preserve modern/colonial ways of life.

In addition to reinforcing dominant knowledges and subjectivities, pedagogies of urgency also have a profound impact on which movement practices are prioritized and what is deemed legitimate as political praxis. This is exemplified by Ella's reflections, who was very involved in XRNL from its early beginnings. While talking about why XR is not very diverse, she calls for the need to build deep relations across difference that echoes Motta’s (2016) concept of ‘critical intimacy’. Yet, Ella notes:

I think [building a broad movement] requires a lot of energy, and I’m not sure people are willing to sacrifice their energy for this deep encounter compared to sacrificing their energies to organise toilets for an action, which is more necessary short-term kind of. […] I think people are just in a rush.

Ella's quote illustrates how the felt, experienced urgency of climate and ecological collapse creates a ‘culture of urgency’ within the movement, where practices not immediately related to direct action and mass mobilization are often deemed of secondary importance. This is affirmed by Matteo, whom I interviewed in October 2020. He has been part of the national coordination circle and very involved in XRNL's ‘regenerative cultures’ circles. ‘We need a regenerative culture’ is one of XRNL's key principles & values, referring to the need for cultural adaptation to socio-ecological collapse, making space for our emotional response and building plural cultures founded on care for self, earth, and each other rather than on domination, exclusion, and separation (Extinction Rebellion Sydney, 2020). Even if in theory it is one of XR's core theories of change (Extinction Rebellion UK 2019), in practice regenerative cultures are often marginalized. Over the course of 2019, people I spoke with who were involved in regenerative cultures often lamented that it is not always recognized as an important element of the movement's political praxis, feeling it tends to get overshadowed by the urgency of direct action. As Matteo put it, regenerative cultures are often reduced to self-care strategies ‘to recharge your batteries’, rather than recognized as being of profound political significance.

This translates into a hierarchization of politics that privileges direct action, and delegitimizes the political potential of relationship and coalition-building, care for self and community, and prefiguration, which are often perceived as ‘less urgent’. In ‘the talk’ and elsewhere, non-violent civil disobedience is generally positioned as the core theory of change of XRNL. This reinforces a gendered and racialized understanding of which kinds of activism are really capable of achieving change. Direct action is defined by a particular type of ‘doing’ and infused with thrill and heroism traditionally associated with white masculinity, and therefore is often held up as the ‘gold standard’ of activism (Chan & Curnow, 2017; Craddock, 2019). The prioritization of direct action also universalizes the experience of bodies that can count on race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality-based privileges in situations of arrest – thus tending to exclude those who are outside these norms. In this way, movement pedagogies that posit urgency as the correct response to climate and ecological collapse invisibilize political praxes that do not conform to the white masculine norm, and foreclose possibilities for ‘critical intimacy’ (Motta, 2016, p. 40) essential to learning other ways of being and resisting together.

I thus posit that through pedagogies of urgency, rebels learn to understand, experience and act on climate and ecological collapse in a way that reinforces the logics of colonial capitalism, universalizes ways of knowing and being rooted in Eurocentric modernity and white masculinity, and erases and denies the existence of the gendered and racialized ‘other’. As Isaksen (2020) demonstrates in her discourse analysis of XRUK, the emphasis on urgency is part of a larger dominant techno-scientific discourse in XR that relies primarily on modern (natural) science to make sense of the climate and ecological crises, while ignoring the role of power relations and oppression. However, this representation has never gone uncontested, as it has always existed alongside pedagogies that privilege a socio-ecological understanding, emphasizing the interconnectedness of climate change with systems of oppression and the importance of climate and ecological justice (Isaksen, 2020). The latter is particularly present in XR's principles and values, and in its regenerative cultures. In the next section, I turn to a discussion on how the COVID-19 pandemic helped to shift who is ‘heard, seen and rendered knowing’ (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 5) within the movement, bringing to the fore pedagogies for unlearning the subjectivities, knowledges, and relationships based on urgency, and learning new ones that centre social justice, prefiguration, and building relations across difference.

COVID-19 and pedagogical (im)possibilities from the margins

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the lives of individual rebels, as well as on XRNL as a movement. It abruptly cut short the possibilities for physical protest and organizing, as well as directing away media, public, and political attention. The disruption to people's lives caused many members to take a step back from organizing, aggravated by the loss of feelings of community and solidarity that sustain the movement. At the same time, movement organizers indicated in the interviews I conducted in October 2020 that they also experienced the pandemic as ‘giving space’ and a welcome ‘slowing down’. As many movement activities slowed to a halt and the planned rebellion¹⁰ in April 2020 was cancelled, the ‘culture of urgency’ I described in the previous section was disrupted. This provided space for some of the ‘deep encounters’ that Ella described. Although the devastating impacts of the pandemic should not be dismissed, crises like these have the potential to shred the ‘veil of normalcy’ (Icaza & Vazquez, 2013) that covers systems of domination, making visible some of the violent exclusions present in the movement and society at large. In this way, the pandemic helped to shift who is ‘heard, seen and rendered knowing within movement struggles and practices’ (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 5), opening up possibilities to not only unsettle the pedagogies of urgency but to facilitate dialogue with(in) pedagogies at the movements’ margins.

When speaking of the movement's (epistemological) margins, it is important to emphasize that these are multiple, fluid, shifting, and not always easily defined. However, throughout my research, some contours of these margins came clearly into view. The absence of people of colour, indigenous and working-class people and voices in the climate movement has been widely noted and acknowledged (see, e.g. Cheuk, 2016; Derbali, 2019). Indigenous and decolonial perspectives are often marginalized in the Dutch climate movement, yet have become increasingly acknowledged over the past years, due to the hard work of a handful of indigenous and decolonial activists. I interviewed one of them, from West Papua, in the first phase of my research. He had been actively seeking out coalitions with the climate movement, including XR, emphasizing the importance of indigenous perspectives and the interconnectedness of the struggles for climate justice and indigenous self-determination. I already touched upon the marginalization of justice-based approaches and regenerative cultures and its associated knowledges, practices and subjectivities within the movement. These knowledge-practices are most clearly embodied by the three cultures circles: Future of Democracy, Inclusion & Power and Regenerative Cultures. Together, these three circles represent the movement's prefigurative politics, striving for bottom-up cultural and political transformation. They emphasize intersectionality,¹¹ anti-oppression, direct democracy, justice, care, spirituality, and emotions, drawing from a wide range of academic and activist knowledges.

Over the course of 2020, however, a significant shift started to occur regarding which knowledges and practices are centred in XRNL. Matteo reflects that at the start of 2020, ‘we were not ready’ for an approach that is centred on justice, but now reflects:

We saw this shift, from really narrow ‘we’re going to go extinct’ to […] ‘well, there are some people who are already really being affected by the consequences [of climate change].’ We might go extinct, but that is not even the main priority at the moment. It's also about what is happening right now, and understanding how everything is interlinked. So, you cannot really talk about climate justice without talking about social justice.

This demonstrates how pedagogies of urgency were slowly being unlearned and unsettled. All of the interviewees I spoke with in 2020 reflected on how dialogue and interaction within the movement, and with movements and subjects on the margins of XRNL played an important role in this transformation. They placed particular emphasis on the role of people from the cultures circles stepping into key organizing positions, and the interactions with Black Lives Matter and indigenous activists, which opened up opportunities to learn about the intersections between anti-racism, colonialism, and climate change. The shared struggle of the pandemic also brought movements closer together, leading to initiatives like ‘Beter Uit De Crisis’, which united a wide range of social movements organizing together to formulate their vision for a more just and sustainable pathway out of the crisis.

By disrupting the ‘culture of urgency’, the pandemic also provided space to reflect on the goals of the movement. As Kate, who was part of strategy stewardship processes during the pandemic, puts it:

Corona made us reflect on the movement and our position in society, what is our goal as a movement. We’re not just here for resistance, but also for community building and local resilience.

Two online People's Assemblies (PAs) organized between April and June 2020 played an important role in this. People's Assemblies are a deliberative democracy tool based on three pillars of radical inclusivity, active listening, and trust. They depart from a relational understanding of knowledge generation, seeking to contribute to the movements’ discourse formation through collective deliberation. This was one of the first times that PAs were used in XRNL, bringing together a few dozen people from across the movement to deliberate on a particular set of questions. The aim was to formulate the movement's vision in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and its strategy moving forward. Kate reflects that during regular meetings there is often no space to discuss for instance the role of social justice in the movement. She notes that PAs thus have an important contribution to make by opening up space for a collaborative process to articulate XRNL's ‘way of looking at the world’.

By making evident some of the inequalities that the colonial capitalist system tries so hard to obscure, the pandemic caused many in the first People's Assembly to reflect on the interconnectedness between social justice and the climate and ecological crisis. This culminated in a shift in the movement strategy, as ‘involving allies in the Rebellion and building an intersectional mass movement’ became one of its key pillars. This was accompanied by the creation of a new circle on collaborations, with the explicit mandate to coordinate and facilitate collaboration with other (social justice) movements. During the first phase of my research, I was already struck by the deep concern most of the interviewees held for social justice, spanning across different circles, local groups, ages, class, and racial backgrounds. More than half of my interviewees explicitly linked climate change to colonialism, capitalism and/or the patriarchy as underlying structures. For instance, one interviewee, Linda, noted ‘since [joining the movement] I am more anti-capitalist than ever’, and Christine referred to the inequality of responsibility and impacts, linking the richness of The Netherlands and the Global North to ‘robbing the South empty’ in the colonial past as well as the present. Nevertheless, these perspectives were hardly reflected in the dominant knowledge-practices of the movement. The People's Assemblies functioned as a dialogical space where pedagogies of urgency could be unlearned, and learning from/with these marginal epistemologies could take place. As Motta (2016, p. 44) argues, these dialogical spaces are essential for healing and fostering critical intimacy ‘between and within our wounded selves and communities’.

This shift in movement strategy started to materialize during the next planned ‘Rebellion’ in September 2021. Kate reflects that during the September Rebellion, ‘we did well embodying our movement strategy’, which she describes as a combination of demonstrating alternatives (prefiguration), centring social justice, and cooperating with other movements while at the same time causing disruption. Disruptive actions that targeted corporations and banks in the financial heart of Amsterdam were accompanied by a legal manifestation, organized around the demand for a Citizen's Assembly on climate and ecological justice.¹² The manifestation was mostly organized by the cultures circles, and included a conscious effort to enter into dialogue by inviting other movements to organize workshops and events, including a panel discussion with labour, feminist, and anti-racist organizers on intersectionality in the climate movement, and workshops on degrowth and decolonizing permaculture. The debrief on the final day of the Rebellion was marked with contentment, as many rebels present reflected that they felt the movement had not only sustained itself during the pandemic, but had also ‘matured’ over the past year. Matteo echoes this, when he reflects that regenerative cultures have become more embedded in the movement, not just as ‘an environment that gives us energy, a culture of care, support, sharing and emotions’, but also ‘trying to change the way we live in the world, the way we work together, and think about ourselves and the planet’.

At the same time, the processes of (un)learning that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated are in no sense complete. The fact that structural inequality and justice are only now starting to become more central in the movement's narratives and strategy is a powerful reminder of the relative securities that most of its members enjoy, and the power relations that structure XRNL. The same goes for the ability of many in the movement to isolate themselves from the worst impacts of the pandemic. It cannot be forgotten that these pedagogical processes are premised on the tremendous pain, death, and oppression of those who have always been at the receiving end of modern/colonial violence. This points to some of the contradictions and impossibilities of dialogue and transforming power relations amidst ongoing inequality. Langstaff argues that as anxiety is taking hold of those who could claim a ‘standing in the world’, they ‘stumbled upon a narrow stretch of common ground with those who have been the objects of modernity's most violent inclusions and foundational exclusions […] herein lies the possibility of coalition’ (2016, p. 339). Yet, the way in which we are all unevenly implicated in the erasures and violence of the modern/colonial world renders these possibilities elusive.

In addition, whilst learning about justice and systems of oppression is essential to disrupt dominant logics of whiteness, patriarchy and capital, this does not necessarily signal a departure from monological ways of knowing and being that characterize modernity/coloniality. Although People's Assemblies provide much-needed spaces for counter-hegemonic pedagogies to emerge, we need to remain vigilant of whose perspectives are centred in these spaces, which requires a sensitivity to the absences and the ways in which people experiencing oppression are often silent/silenced (Motta, 2016). Pedagogies of regenerative cultures, radical democracy and anti-oppression often remain rooted in modern/colonial knowledge systems. If the assumption of a singular humanity is not questioned, and the power relations that structure coloniality not made visible and interrogated, the possibilities for dialogue with the movements’ margins are inherently at risk of replicating violence, denial, and appropriation. Restructuring these power relations requires real transformations regarding whose politics and bodies get to belong to the struggle for climate justice. Within the frameworks of Extinction Rebellion, this unsettling may never be fully achieved.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to shift who is ‘heard, seen and rendered knowing’ (Motta & Esteves, 2014, p. 5) in Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. Rather than approaching social movements as knowledge producers or epistemic struggles, I understand them as inherently pedagogical. This approach helps to make sense of how XRNL is simultaneously implicated in the reproduction of the violent logics of colonial, heteropatriarchal capitalism, and in the unlearning of the knowledges, social relationships and ways of life that sustain these logics. In this way, I hope to contribute some insights into the pedagogical processes that can support hegemonically situated climate movements of the Global North to resist dominant ways of knowing and being. This requires a letting go of pedagogies premised on the desire to preserve the modern/colonial world, and embracing pedagogies rooted in liberatory projects of global justice and collective healing. At the same time, it calls for an awareness and recognition of some of the impossibilities and limitations that must be navigated. Instead of providing definitive answers, I position myself as part of this pedagogical process of asking questions, becoming together, and imagining other ways of being and resisting.

This article focused in particular on urgency as a pedagogy in XRNL that reinforces dominant knowledges, subjectivities and relationships: through its assumptions of a singular humanity by centring the vulnerability and ontological insecurity of those who mostly benefited from modern/colonial relations of power; and by privileging mass civil disobedience as the only legitimate strategy to achieve change. In this way, it universalizes ways of knowing and being rooted in Eurocentric modernity and white masculinity, while erasing the existence of the gendered and racialized ‘other’. I continued to demonstrate how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the unsettling of pedagogies of urgency and facilitated dialogues with(in) pedagogies at the movement's margins by uncovering systems of domination and disrupting the ‘culture of urgency’.

This facilitated processes of learning and unlearning that centred justice-based perspectives on climate and ecological collapse, movement collaboration and fostering relations across difference, as well as the legitimization of political praxes that emphasize care, prefiguration, and community. Although these are hopeful developments, this does not necessarily challenge the hegemony of modernity/coloniality and Eurocentric ways of knowing and being. It remains to be seen to what extent these pedagogical processes will restructure whose bodies, politics, and epistemologies can belong to the movement. I have also attempted to demonstrate some of the impossibilities for dialogue and transformation. In situations of inequality and oppression, the emergence of emancipatory pedagogies from the margins of social movements is undeniably premised on the suffering of particularly those who have always been partial to modernity/coloniality's most violent exclusions. It is important to attend to these realities, as we embark on collaborative processes of healing our relations to earth and each other. As Gabrys (2018, p. 61) writes about Anna Tsing's (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World, it appears that:

‘the end of the world’ is less a scene of the planet as an apocalyptic fireball, and more an encounter with the relations that we have ignored, overlooked or even ruined.

Acknowledgements

This article could not have been written without the unfailing care, wisdom, and feedback from fellow organizers and activists in Extinction Rebellion and the Dutch climate justice movement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam under Grant MATP-1 2020.

Notes on contributors

Fleur Zantvoort

Fleur Zantvoort is an organizer and activist in the climate justice movement in the Netherlands. She holds an MA in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies.

Notes

1 Although both Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future are active beyond Europe, both movements emerged in Europe, and it is the focus of my analysis here.

2 I use modern/colonial here to assert there is no modernity without coloniality (Quijano, 2010); that coloniality as the ongoing relations of power rooted in colonial hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, nature, knowledge, and being is constitutive of modernity (Escobar, 2007).

3 ‘Climate and ecological emergency’ is the terminology used by XR itself. However, I want to point out that emergency language is itself subject to multiple erasures, as I will argue further on in this article.

4 See Extinction Rebellion Scotland (2019) for an early overview of these critiques.

5 Becoming ‘otherwise’, corresponding to ‘an other logic’ that cannot be defined through the principles of Eurocentric modernity (Escobar, 2007), is central to Motta and Esteves (2014) discussion of social movement pedagogies. This produces some tensions when applied to XRNL, which is partially situated in the logics of Eurocentric modernity; yet it is relevant to examine XRNL's engagement with indigenous and decolonial perspectives and other ‘parallel Epistemologies’ (Esteves, 2020) at its margins through this lens.

6 XRNL is organized using a mixture of sociocracy and holacracy. The ‘circles’ are an important organizational unit, referring to groups of people with a particular goal and the autonomy to decide on a certain set of issues. There are circles at national level, as well as local groups in different cities and regions that are sometimes also divided in circles. Circles can have one or more ‘sub-circles’, and can be part of a ‘super-circle’. For instance, the national ‘Cultures’ super-circle consists of the circles Inclusion & Power, Regenerative Cultures and Future of Democracy.

7 I use pseudonyms to protect the identity of interviewees.

8 Since the beginning of XRNL there have been internal critiques of some of the silences in ‘the talk’ specifically and XRNL's narratives more broadly, and ‘the talk’ has since gone through many iterations that have aimed to highlight the social (justice) impacts of the climate and ecological crises, some of its links to colonialism and indigenous resistance.

9 ‘Rebels’ is the term used by people in XR to refer to themselves and each other. Although I think it should be questioned who can call themselves a ‘rebel’ and what it means to claim this subjectivity given the realities of resistance in a modern/colonial world order, I prefer to use the self-assigned terminology here as opposed to ‘activists’.

10 XR(NL) organizes around bi-yearly (inter)nationally coordinated periods of action called ‘rebellions’.

11 ‘Intersectionality’ is generally used in XRNL to refer to the idea that different systems of oppression, and therefore the struggles against them, are connected. I want to acknowledge that this is different from the way the concept was originally used by black feminists to highlight the multiple oppressions and exclusions faced by black women (Crenshaw, 1991).

12 XRNL currently has three demands, of which the demand for Citizen's Assemblies is the third. Citizen's Assemblies are a democratic instrument that are meant to be representative of the general population. They are given a mandate to decide on the measures to be taken for climate and ecological justice to be realized, through deliberative processes and informed by experts. Several Citizen's Assemblies on climate change are already being organized across Europe. See Extinction Rebellion Netherlands (2021).