Learnings
Climate anxiety, young people, and political disaffection: the right to enjoyment as a way of building democracy [ECD1_LAB]
How to materialize our political ideas?
We hear more and more young people talking about climate anxiety, social unrest or political disaffection. But also of new forms of organization, of care… and of hope. Listening is the vehicle where we allow difficult concepts to emerge. And that’s how it happened on the final day of the Public Policy Lab of the School of Creativity and Democracy: a day full of emotion and the desire to build together. The day began with a conversation on climate anxiety, youth and political disaffection led by Alejandra Gallardo, Platoniq expert on climate change and TikTok, with Sara S. Ribés, climate activist from End Fossil BCN, and Carla Riera, lawyer specialized in Human Rights and the impact of global crises on the welfare, especially of the most vulnerable people.
Eco-anxiety is aggravated by institutional inaction and the lack of real mechanisms for participation
We know it but we say it little: climate anxiety is not only an individual malaise, but a collective and political response to decades of ecological degradation. And although it is experienced individually, as a reaction to the “loss of a future” and the powerlessness of not being able to act in the face of global crises, it has systemic causes. Sara spoke to us about putting the collective at the center, overcoming the meritocratic and productivist logic (which fragments the idea of the commons) and teaching from an early age to cooperate and not compete.
Militancy requires resources that today are privileges (time, health, support networks)
How to explain political disaffection among young people? Carla gave us the keys to understand it: firstly, there are people who simply do not want to become politicized, due to privileges and/or social disconnection; secondly, and this is where we should really work, there are also people who cannot become politicized due to precariousness, lack of resources, we should direct all our efforts to these people; and finally, there is a last group that have been politicized, but have stopped being so due to institutional exhaustion or lack of representation. Maintaining the effort to bring to the institutions the marginal voices, those who do not find the channel and who, moreover, are the most affected, should make us reflect on the democratic representativeness that governs our institutions.
Enjoyment is a right, not something we are allowed to do
Led by Alejandra, the conversation moved from community mental health to the right to enjoyment as a basic demand to give form (valid and powerful) to complaints that have been historically undervalued, especially if they come from invisibilized or colonized collectives.
When we give importance to activism when redefining the collective from the neighborhood, neighborhood, union, etc., putting the focus on local action as a more accessible, concrete and potentially transformative space, and we allow ourselves artistic expressions such as dance or theater, for example, to recover enjoyment and the body as political spaces, then we are making inclusive democracy.
A happy ending for a School of Creativity
After the conversation, all of us who were there: activists, philosophers, communicators, politicians, young migrants and the whole group that made up the first generation formed by the School of Creativity and Democracy gave ourselves a playful and committed space to turn the conclusions we had all reached into a fanzine.
Thus we come to the end of the School of Creativity and Democracy, a space to think and, above all, to experience the affective reconnection with democracy through the arts and creativity.
We will be back in February, you can register for the second edition here.
