Unlearning the Activist Script #2: It’s Urgent Unlearning the Activist Script

An online event with Anthea Lawson, author of The Entangled Activist, and Nick Anim, co-Director of Transition Town Brixton and researcher in environment and sustainable development at the Development Planning Unit of University College London.

Of course it’s urgent. The world is burning. Inequality between and within nations is continuing to grow. We do need to respond. But what happens when we are driven by urgency in how we act and relate to each other?

Nick Anim and Anthea Lawson will look at how urgency shapes activism. What gets left out when our frame is urgency? It can be our own grief and uncertainty, creating a recipe for burnout. And it can be questions of justice, which can fall by the wayside when the climate clock is ticking. How can we think about justice and urgency together? And how can we learn to discern when we are acting from urgency in ways that are unhelpful, while still recognising – in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words – the ‘fierce urgency of now’?