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Fast slow: Imagining climate futures beyond the end of the world
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
Swansea University Author:
Angharad Closs Stephens
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© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
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DOI (Published version): 10.1177/25148486261421784
Abstract
This article addresses the call to ‘act now’ in response to climate change, in a context where ‘end-thinking’ appears dominant in popular culture and climate activism. Building on literature from Geography and International Relations, I develop an argument against the linear, globalised accounts of...
| Published in: | Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space |
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| ISSN: | 2514-8486 2514-8494 |
| Published: |
SAGE Publications
2026
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa71507 |
| Abstract: |
This article addresses the call to ‘act now’ in response to climate change, in a context where ‘end-thinking’ appears dominant in popular culture and climate activism. Building on literature from Geography and International Relations, I develop an argument against the linear, globalised accounts of a homogenous future present in some of these calls, and argue for a focus on the affective and everyday register, and how people go about making their lives viable. In making this argument, I draw philosophical insights from a performance work by artist Sonia Hughes called, ‘I am from Reykjavik’. In this work, Hughes builds a hut over the course of seven hours, to ask how, as a Black woman, she makes herself feel at home. Drawing inspiration from the ‘slow time’ of this building project, and by bringing work on environmental politics into conversation with affect theories, the article presents the concept of Fast slow. This concept, first developed to describe an architectural process by Lovett et al., captures a sense of impatience for change, with hesitation and ambivalence in terms of how we act for a better future. Overall, the article argues against the linear and depersonalised ideas about time and society prevalent in some elements of climate activism, and joins others who are calling for a deeper consideration of how we imagine the climate crisis. Thinking change and the future in a different register is important to avoid the climate crisis becoming weaponized as part of a polarized, populist politics. |
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| Keywords: |
Affect; climate change; future; politics; performance |
| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |
| Funders: |
This work was in part funded by a AHRC Impact Acceleration Account small grant, titled‘ Cosmopolitan communities in ‘left-behind’ places’. |