Rising Against the Tide: Resisting and Repurposing Hegemonic Tools to Promote Environmental Action

Environmental social scientist Urooj Raja explores how to promote environmental action through the repurposing of six hegemonic forces - anthropocentrism, extractivism, capitalism, legal hegemony, technofixes, and imaginative hegemony - drawing upon and offering practical insights rooted in both everyday actions and contemporary resistance studies.

This book delves into the concept of adaptive resilience, through which climate and environmental actors (CEAs) resist or repurpose these hegemonic forces by leveraging a combination of firsthand experiences, knowledge, networks, and skills. Raja argues that CEAs lean on adaptive resilience to resist and sometimes repurpose hegemonic forces and tools, which, when left unchallenged, often impede attempts to combat environmental inaction and climate change by design.

The author addresses the complexity and contradictions of how CEAs have engaged in contemporary climate action in the face of oppression, cautioning against a reliance on ＂purity solutions.＂ This book’s analysis traverses the environmental action ecosystems, engaging in discussions on traditional modes of activism, such as environmental campaigns, but also touches on novel ways of doing and thinking about environmental activism and action, including how CEAs harness and leverage technology and their imagination to do more for the climate. In doing so, this book offers an updated mapping of some of the less-discussed components of 21st-century environmental and climate activism and how CEAs, despite the odds, deliver and act when it comes to environmental action.

Urooj Raja is Assistant Professor of Public Communication and Advocacy at Loyola University Chicago, USA.