This project was part of the 2025-2026 Climate Solutions Scholars Program, where we (two graduate students, Jamie Stevens and Estraven Lupino-Smith) researched polarization as it relates to movements for climate justice in rural BC. The project focused on how arts-led social infrastructure might provide opportunities for connecting people and mobilizing across difference for anti-colonial climate action.
Astrida Neimanis and Onyx Sloan Morgan were mentors for this project, supporting and guiding research into creating some working understandings of what polarization is, and how polarization impacts mobilizing for climate justice.
To begin, we are both settler-scholars and we offer gratitude to Indigenous scholars who have deeply informed this research. It is the research of IndigenEYEZ, Dr. Jeannette Armstrong, Dr. Shawn Wilson, Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Dr. Gwen Bridges, and Dr. Jennifer Grenz that grounds our work in an understanding of our polarizing tendencies within the colonial project – notably the binary categorizations of Us vs. the Other and Culture vs. Nature – and also possible anti-colonial pathways forward.
Arts-Led Anti-Colonial Climate Justice Work
The humanities have much to offer climate research, not as an add-on, but as a necessary compliment to scientific inquiry. Institutions such as the IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – have played a critical role in providing information for policymakers through synthesizing the scientific basis of climate change and its impacts and future risks, as well as providing options for adaptation and mitigation. At the same time, climate change is not only about science, it is also about socio-political power – who has it, who doesn’t, how it is distributed, and how this is influencing climate justice mobilization. Therefore, this arts based scholarship explored how power and injustice are key dimensions of the climate crisis, how that relates to issues of polarization, and what are possible paths forward in the rural context.
This work started by asking some broad questions to situate the research and define the trajectory of inquiry:
What is a justice-based approach to climate action?
How might we define or situate polarization for our project?
What are the embodied, emplaced, and everyday realities of polarization in rural British Columbia?
What are the ways that polarization creates barriers to this approach?
What are the conditions surrounding polarization?
What can be done to connect people across differences – either because of identity and lived experiences and/or political position?
How can power be interrogated in normative framings of polarization?
The FEELed Note: The Problem of Polarization outlines the ‘answers’ to these questions that emerged. In addition to these research findings, two outputs for the project were delivered:
1. Connecting Otherwise – A PICS Grant
In May, we submitted an application to the PICS Foresight Grant in hopes to bring together academics and community partners to continue the work of this project this fall. Collaborations for Anti-Colonial and Intersectional Feminist Climate Justice would bring Black, trans- and ecofeminist researchers and practitioners together with Indigenous Land-based changemakers to: 1) create a community of practice for climate justice, as directed by Indigenous-led and place-based authorities; 2) share strategies for values-led community-building; and 3) deepen an understanding of how different justice struggles are entangled in climate justice work in regional and rural BC.
2. Otherwise Polarized – a FEELed Lab Podcast
Otherwise Polarize draws on storytelling as a creative arts-led method that has broad appeal and can be adapted to many settings, including the rural communities we are focused on for this project. Storytelling a research practice generates, interprets, and shares knowledge through a narrative where there is no need to erase nuanced and complex realities. For this part of the project, we:
- created the pilot Otherwise Polarized episodes (release: Summer 2026)
- hosted a skill-share workshop in collaboration with the Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) on podcasting to expand the capacity of the FEELed Lab and broader UBC-O research community for podcasting, and
- developed a framework for the continuation of Otherwise Polarized as an ongoing FEELed Lab podcast.
This project is supported by the Centre for Climate Justice, the FEELed Lab, and the Climate Solutions Scholars Program.
The FEELed lab 