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Document Details :

Title: Ritualizing Climate Grief
Subtitle: Exploring Protests, Civil Disobedience, and Climate Liturgies
Author(s): GRAU, Marion
Journal: Studies in Interreligious Dialogue
Volume: 33    Issue: 1   Date: 2023   
Pages: 47-62
DOI: 10.2143/SID.33.1.3292293

Abstract :
This article explores how climate activists in a Northern European context find strength, community, and fighting spirit through and around planning and executing actions. Ritual studies is used to explore activists’ actions and make visible the ritual character in the negotiation scientific facts, political expression, democratic action, religious and societal values, and civil disobedience. They engage emotions, use body formations and clothes, costumes, visual and sound aids to signal resistance and at times to block access or traffic. Actions often engage public spaces and change their function and form for a short while. Activists may plan actions, but frequently have to adjust to a shifting context in the place and time of the action. The article looks at examples from actions against fossil fuel companies in the capital city of Oslo, as well as actions in response to mining companies, and green colonialism in the form of wind farms in indigenous Sam territories in Northern Norway. It shows how grief galvanizes creativity and manifests a form of agency in spaces where many others remain silent or feel a lack of agency. How does grief embraced become a form of resisting disempowerment and insist on retaining agency in situations where fossil logics prevail?

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