This project is part of the 2025-2026 Climate Solutions Scholars Program, where the two graduate students, Jamie Stevens and Estraven Lupino-Smith, are researching polarization as it relates to movements for climate justice in rural communities. The project is 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 are acting as 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.
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, and how that relates to issues of polarization.
This work started by asking some broad questions to situate the research and define the trajectory of inquiry. These research questions have been guiding the work:
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?
Jamie and Estraven are looking forward to sharing their research with the FEELed Lab through engaged workshops and a series of short podcasts. They have presented their initial research findings at the Solutions Scholar Midterm Meeting and have participated in training sessions organized through the CCJ. They are currently developing a paper that suggests some working definitions of the aspects of polarization, and the first of the podcasts will be available soon.
This part of the project began in September 2025 and will continue through June 2026.
This project is supported by the Centre for Climate Justice, the FEELed Lab, and the Climate Solutions Scholars Program.
The FEELed lab 