Breaking climate justice ‘silence’ in everyday life: The environmentalist killjoy,negotiation and relationship risk

Abstract

The moral and justice dimensions of climate change are uncomfortable and commonly avoided in the conversations of day-to-day UK life. This ‘silence’ impedes the genesis of a public discourse to drive justice-oriented social and political change. Two social realms identified as silence-breaking are social movements and personal relationships, yet the potential of this intersection has yet to be explored. This article applies Goffman’s theories of interaction to a qualitative study of UK-based climate activists to show how silence around climate justice is often a means to avoid relationship conflict, and the ways in which this is negotiated within everyday interactions. Activist participants faced conversational resistance through normative avoidance of climate-related death talk, and from negative environmental activist stereotyping. In efforts to protect relationships while promoting their climate politics, participants backgrounded their activist identity, slowly ‘chipped away’ at climate obstruction through social and sustainable practices, and prioritised humour. Breaking silences required taking relationship risks through radical environmentalist ‘killjoy-talk’: a deliberate, politicised transgression of polite conversation norms. The article reflects on the normativities and loci of power discursively obstructing a moral engagement, and the potential for activists’ practical and discursive strategies to work against these to normalise politicised climate talk.

Introduction

This article explores how climate activists find ways to broach difficult conversations about climate change with non-activist family, friends and colleagues, while protecting these relationship bonds from possible interpersonal conflict. The research questions are: (1) How do climate activists use and manage their environmentalist identity and politics to break silences around climate justice? and (2) What are the implications of this for activists’ personal relationships? The article is located in the UK cultural context to explore how the politics of death – in this case, climate-related death – are sequestered and uncovered through negotiating norms of convivial conversation. I will demonstrate that climate justice silence between personal ties is an interactional issue; being silent or silenced may result from, or be accommodated within, power-infused relationships (Fivush, 2010) but particular identities can break climate justice silence as a political act (Katriel, 2021). The article contributes to an understanding of how the moral dimensions of climate change are engaged with in the everyday, supporting the wider goal of how to drive social change and action.

Currently, justice is absent from much of UK public discourse on tackling climate change, which tends instead to focus on the depoliticised technicalities of carbon emissions (Institute of Development Studies, 2021). This problem is compounded in light of recent survey data finding only moderate population-level felt responsibility to help reduce climate change (Phillips et al., 2018). Everyday conversations with friends and family are crucial in the problem of collective silence around climate justice because conversations are social practices carried out routinely and frequently whilst always entailing improvisation and emotional involvement; conversations can perpetuate established views, or they can effect innovative thinking and actions (Jamieson, 2020). Face-to-face political talk about an issue can function as an everyday pedagogy of open and civic-minded attitudes and practices (Conover & Searing, 2005). Private-sphere dialogic deliberation then feeds into wider conversations, and into reasoning and the negotiation of meanings of climate change at public discourse level (Boykoff et al., 2009). In parallel, social movements play a crucial role because in the public realm they can break social silences by narratively foregrounding the moral, ethical and justice perspectives of an issue (Zerubavel, 2006). Members of the climate movement of course also lead personal lives, providing opportunistic spaces in which to confront climate justice silence as a form of relational activism – that is, everyday activism which uses the power of personal relationships to effect change (O’Shaughnessy & Kennedy, 2010). Currently, little is known about whether and how everyday forms of activism confront social silence around climate justice. To situate the study within the literature, I will discuss the cultural and political economic conditions for silence around climate justice, linking these to everyday relational activism and the significance of activist identity management. I will then introduce Goffman’s theories of social interaction as a framework to analyse the personal (rather than the public) sphere of climate activism, within which activists seek to mobilise their friends and family into dialogue and action on climate injustice. After outlining the study’s methods, I then present the findings, discussing these thematically.

Everyday activism, identities and negative stereotyping

While some scholars have suggested that discussing climate change is easier in a relaxed setting with trusted friends and family (e.g. Wang et al., 2020; Zerubavel, 2010), empirical work has found the topic is often avoided with friends and family as a depressing ‘conversation-killer’, or suspended to shield loved ones from emotionally troubling information (Norgaard, 2011). Similarly, research on contentious topics such as ‘Brexit’ has suggested that people self-censor as an act of care for loved ones (Davies, 2021). What has yet to be explored empirically is an in-depth understanding of the discursive obstruction or facilitation of climate change in different relational contexts, and in which relational situations might silences be broken. For example, what is the role of social identity in the ethical act of being silent, and in the process of being silenced?

To consider how silences are broken we must first consider why they occur and how they are sustained. Kari Norgaard’s (2011) study of socially organised denial within a Norwegian rural community found citizens actively kept climate discussion at arm’s length to construct innocence, maintain social privilege, and uphold a sense of security and order. Implicatory conversations were particularly unwelcome in social and domestic spaces where there were expectations of emotional shelter. Norgaard suggested Norway-specific cultural factors supported the socially organised denial of climate change, which in turn helped reproduce the polity perpetuating insufficient governmental climate action. Norgaard’s findings provide a useful framework for thinking through the normative forces shaping climate silence, but they leave room for understanding how conversations play out when the interaction is seen by some as a political opportunity to confront climate non-response, despite this risking the sense of security and order.

Turning from Norgaard’s Norwegian study to this article’s UK context, we can consider matters of culturally acceptable conversation. Today in the UK there is frequent and troubling media coverage of a climate-related disaster happening somewhere in the world. Yet in the UK, as in many richer regions of the world, much of how we go about living everyday life depends upon actively forgetting about our own, as well as others’ mortality (Bauman, 1992). But the shadow of death is ever present in people’s lives in the way it is avoided through routine activities; the inevitability of death is said to give quality and colour to our time spent alive (Simmel, 2007). The same can be said of our entanglement and implication in the causes and effects of climate and ecological change; the high carbon practices which support our emotional and social lives are intricately woven into the capitalist economy (Urry, 2009) and these practices indirectly harm and destroy life. Scholars of death and society have suggested the cultural and institutional sequestration of death in affluent societies is ever more difficult during the contemporary crises of armed conflicts, global pandemics, enduring racial inequalities and climate change (Walter, 2022). Social movements have in the past politicised taboos around the injustices of death, for example the Silence = Death banner slogan used by AIDS campaigners in the 1980s, in calling out the perils of moral apathy (Gamson, 1989). More recently, mortality has been ‘dramatised’ by the climate action group Extinction Rebellion, who have used various communicative techniques to highlight the injustices of death and destruction brought about by structures of power and privilege (Walter, 2022). In light of the anxiety evoked by climate death narratives, Walter (2022) notes the possible counter-productivity of death and extinction rhetoric by the climate movement. This raises the question, are there social settings in which the politicised discussion of climate death is more or less discomforting?

Activism is commonly understood as public sphere activity which seeks political and social change. Activists in a social movement ‘frame’ or represent an issue of injustice in part by publicly expressing and managing a collective identity to distinguish ‘us’ from opponents and bystanders (Polletta & Jasper, 2001). For example, this expression included foregrounding one’s gay or lesbian identity during the AIDS ACT UP campaigning mentioned earlier (Polletta & Jasper, 2001). Activism can also be performed within private sphere ‘submerged networks’ (Melucci, 1985), integrating everyday life with material and cultural codes and practices towards collective action goals (Horton, 2003). Within private sphere activism, a collective identity may be less important because its expression does not necessarily help to frame an issue. Cherry (2006), O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy (2010) and Haenfler et al. (2012) showed how vegan, environmental and sustainability activism may rely more on building strong personal relationships to advance a movement’s goals than on a collective identity. These authors have described the ways in which relational forms of activism typically involve demonstrating to and encouraging friends and family to care for non-human others. These studies point to a porous boundary between activist practices striving for cultural change, and the many identities, roles and responsibilities in which people are situated day-to-day.

While much literature infers social movement-aligned identities can be autonomously promoted or deprioritised, fewer studies have considered the situations which necessitate active dissociation from a group identity. An ‘identity dilemma’ (McGarry & Jasper, 2015) may arise when the activist perceives disadvantages of aligning themselves with a particular collective identity. Simi and Futrell’s (2009) work on white supremacists found that activists experienced cognitive dissonance between self and social identities as they concealed their activism to limit stigmatisation by outsiders. For environmentalists, experiences of negative stereotyping have long been documented (see Barr & Gilg, 2006; Capek, 1993; Hargreaves, 2016). This poses a problem when the movement requires public buy-in to the reductions in privilege required for climate justice. Some climate activism has recently met with a degree of public backlash (Steentjes et al., 2020), identified as one form of climate denial (Norgaard, 2019). As seen in the past with feminist activists, ridicule and negative stereotype labelling may result (Ferree, 2004). Occasionally articulated in rhetoric by public figures, labelling terms such as ‘irresponsible crusties’ (BBC, 2021) and ‘environmental extremists’ (Hymas et al., 2021) have recently been used by members of the UK government to publicly deride and demean individuals who attempt to disrupt ways of doing business-as-usual. Even people not opposed to tackling climate change can still perceive environmental activists as militant, pious and eccentric (Bashir et al., 2013). This can lead to those campaigning for change to distance themselves or disidentify from the images, practices and narratives of environmentalists and activists (Cherry, 2019; McCalman, 2022).

Few scholars have explored the negotiations of an environmental activist identity within the interactions of personal life. Exceptions include Hards (2013) and Hauxwell-Baldwin (2013), both of whom examined the ways in which environmentalists present a version of themselves in domestic contexts according to expectations of the situation, with friends and family triggering the most discomfort with an environmentalist self-identity and lifestyle. The aforementioned two studies did not delve into the reasons for this discomfort, but suggest expressing one’s environmental politics within the interactions of trusting personal relationships is not as straightforward as advocates of this idea have claimed (for example, see Wang et al., 2020; Zerubavel, 2010). Human action is always embedded relationally within social practices, which, in Western societies, often harbour unequal power relations and cultural ideals, such as those concerning gender, age and generation. These social relations may diminish a sense of self and foreclose the sharing of one’s concerns (Jamieson, 1999; Smart, 2007). In this vein, environmentalists’ struggles to speak their mind about climate justice as a form of relational activism may necessitate what Jamieson (1999, p. 477) would call ‘creative identity and relationship-saving strategies’. The role of these processes in climate silence has yet to be explored. In the next section I will discuss how a Goffmanian micro-level analysis can help to understand how identities and relationships are managed and negotiated, with the aim of discovering how the avoidance of climate justice talk might work within this context.

Goffman’s interaction order

Erving Goffman’s (1967) theories on the interaction order provide a framework for thinking through conversational lulls. I have applied Goffman here because his work explores literal silences, as well as the performance of identities which precede them. During the early stages of data collection, I found that Goffman’s theories resonated with my participants’ reports of climate silence being literal as well as symbolic; participants would describe moments in everyday conversations when they raised the subject of climate change but were met with an awkward non-response. According to Goffman, within a focused face-to-face interaction each person takes a line according to the socially defined situation. During the conversation, each presents a version of themselves according to expected social norms and identities. Some aspects of one’s ‘self’ may be revealed or concealed to maintain a favourable impression, or ‘face’. In the ritual code, conversation interactants also seek to preserve the ‘face’ of one another by avoiding threatening topics or questioning claims people have made about themselves. Differences of opinion might be covered up by polite acquiescence or ambiguous speech (Collins, 1988). Significant for this study’s examination of silences in personal life, Goffman pointed out the importance of inclusive, involved conversations to reaffirm affective bonds: ‘conversations form the bridge that people build to one another . . . . It is this spark, not the more obvious kinds of love, that lights up the world’ (Goffman, 1967, p. 117). These ‘solidarity feelings’ and ‘moral sentiments’ are the foundations for the enduring emotions of mundane life (Collins, 2004, p. 106).

Goffman’s concept of socially defined situations might include a family meal or a relaxed gathering with friends. In these settings, one is not routinely expected to present a self which is responsible for the global environment (Hargreaves, 2016), or to raise difficult subjects such as the death and loss of climate change. Goffman’s concept of conversation alienation explains the fragile situation in which failure to take turns in talking results in ‘painful silences’ (1967, p. 120) and a swift change of subject is usually required to restore the interaction order. The rupture in dialogical involvement may arise when the topic matter runs out of material, or when one person withdraws when they consider the talker is ‘externally preoccupied’ with something unconnected to themselves (Goffman, 1967). Returning to Norgaard’s (2011) findings of silences within intimate settings, alienation may arise when people feel the boundaries of climate politics do not extend to themselves. Goffman theorised that alienation also results from the ‘faulty interactant’: a ‘killjoy’ who drags down the mood of a conversation and deters mutual involvement (Goffman, 1967, p. 129). But how does the killjoy as a faulty interactant help us understand how climate silence may be sustained or be broken in everyday conversations? Goffman’s theories were underpinned by his belief that the individual is always shaped by the moral sentiments of the society in which they live (Collins, 1988). Considering Goffman’s concept of the faulty interactant, the ability to deter emotional involvement in the conversation would therefore be contingent on topics which are culturally and situationally less acceptable. Here we can connect back to the earlier points on the faux pas of discussing mortality or the troubling topic of climate change. We then begin to see how, rather than a clumsy conversationalist, the killjoy as an individual who aligns themselves with a social movement’s goals may be self-aware of the risks and benefits of introducing a difficult topic, at the same time as others may recognise this tendency in her or him. To support this idea, I will now draw on Ahmed’s (2010) notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’.

The strategic use of the killjoy identity

According to Ahmed (2010), the feminist killjoy is both a pejorative stereotype and an accusation, used to dismiss an individual aligned to the feminist movement who calls out gender injustice. Ahmed found particular resistance to her feminist identity and politics with friends and family who would accuse her of getting in the way of their enjoyment but, in her commitment to opposing inequality, she would continue to raise such topics to confront denialism (Ahmed, 2010; Schmitz & Ahmed, 2014). An environmentalist killjoy could therefore be thought of negatively as an identity stereotype who is recognised by themselves and others as someone who drags down the mood, or makes people feel guilty by talking about climate change. This identity may be concealed or revealed according to the acceptable degree of risk to positive ‘face’ and affective bonds within a conversation (Goffman, 1967).

I have outlined how the literature argues that the symbols and expression of a collective identity are less important in private than in public sphere activism to promote a movement’s goals. And yet, Goffman emphasises the importance of carefully managing one’s identity to protect affective relationships. Further complicating the picture is Ahmed’s strategic use of a culturally derided feminist killjoy, suggesting there is a place for oppositional identities expressed within personal interactions to unsettle moral apathy. Taking into consideration the UK cultural backdrop of negative environmentalist stereotyping which might structure the expression of a climate activist identity, this article seeks to uncover the strategic use of the environmentalist killjoy identity to get climate justice on the conversational agenda with family, friends and colleagues.

Methods

The data for this article arose from a larger study of the intersections of personal life, parenting and environmental activism. I used a purposive sample of mothers, fathers, and guardians, recruited through social media and snowballing. I invited participants who were based in the UK and ‘involved in any type of climate campaigning’. Participants were offered a £25 donation to a charity of their choice as a thank you. I recruited a total of 12 mothers and 8 fathers. This article focuses on adult only rather than adult–child conversations, and the continuities between the public and private spheres.

Data were collected between June 2020 and January 2021, using a mix of in-depth semi-structured interviews and a diary study. The diary was used both as a pseudo-observational method to understand climate change within the private spaces of daily life, and as an interview prompt. Participants were sent a Microsoft Word template with columns asking for information such as the time, place and situational details, as well as a free text section to be completed over the course of 2 weeks prior to the interview. Participants were asked to note the thoughts, feeling and actions relating to climate change in the course of daily life which might include the more mundane moments difficult to recall in the interview setting (Bartlett & Milligan, 2015). All interviews were by videocall (18) or telephone (2) and lasted 45–120 minutes. Questions were structured around themes concerning motivations and experiences of parent activism, views on climate change and climate politics. Following a relational approach to personal life which sees identities and practices as embedded within, and connected to, personal relationships (Smart, 2007), I asked participants to talk about their activism within various friendship and kinship settings. Data were analysed using a thematic approach guided by Ritchie and Spencer’s (2002) staged procedure: re-familiarisation with the data; identification of a thematic framework; line-by-line inductive coding; grouping of similar codes and assigning of analytical concepts; and identification of thematic patterns and associations across the dataset. I used NVivo software to support this process, going back and forth to the theoretical and empirical literature to arrive at the explanatory themes in this article’s findings.

In reflection on the limitations and ethics of the sampling and of the interviews, the study’s commencement coincided with, and was greatly impacted by, the coronavirus pandemic. First, the ‘lockdown’ restrictions on mobility prevented the targeting of a more diverse sample; most likely due to the time pressures of home working and home schooling, participant interest in the study was very slow, which hindered my original plan to locate gatekeepers to access a broader ethnic and socioeconomic representation. The sample was therefore rather homogeneous (most participants recruited were middle class with a tertiary level qualification and a medium to high household income, and all but one participant were white; however this sample reflects the wider UK climate movement [Saunders et al., 2020]). Second, the prevention of in-person meetings caused by the lockdowns created barriers to openness in the videocall. The disadvantages of videocalls include a limited control of interview privacy; coupled with the government stay-at-home order of the moment, it was possible there was a spouse or other family member in the vicinity who could overhear the discussion, which necessitated me asking non-specific questions about ‘your friends and family’ to allow the participant to choose whom they included or not. While this study could not always explore specific family or friendship relationships in everyday climate activism (for example, with partner, or flatmates), it has nonetheless uncovered some key insights into micro-level discursive obstruction of climate justice talk.

In the next section I will turn to my findings which are laid out thematically and discussed in turn. All participant names are pseudonyms.

Silences arising: The uncomfortable topic of climate mortality

The injustices and dangers of climate change were emotionally charged topics for the activists I interviewed. Painful feelings of grief and desperation around the present trajectory of climate inaction were instrumental in the drive to raise awareness of the need for collective action. For these activists, climate was spoken of as a moral matter of life and death for their children, distant others and future beings. But despite emphasising the “supreme importance” of raising the public consciousness, activists were often reticent to politicise friends, family and colleagues who were outside the climate movement. Many told me they had tried in the past but found conversations petered out, what Goffman would call the ‘painful silence’ in the turn-taking of conversation, and efforts to ‘save face’ (Goffman, 1967) led to a mutually-orchestrated change of subject. Tim’s quote below sums up the notion of such silences:

You make the point about climate change, and it doesn’t really matter how strongly or weakly you make it, it just falls into silence, and nobody replies. And it’s not that people necessarily change the subject in a hostile way, nobody’s ever said anything particularly negative [to me], it’s just that it doesn’t go anywhere! No conversation starts, it’s broaching the world’s most important topic, and it goes nowhere! (Tim, male, 50s)

Here Tim describes literal conversational silences as a means to avoid interpersonal conflict. Other activists drew out connections with wider cultural attitudes such as ‘burying heads in the sand’ around existential threats, exemplified by Sophia:

I find it’s quite a hard conversation to bring up with anybody. It’s uncomfortable for people to talk about it. It’s like talking about death really, isn’t it? It’s a bit of a faux pas! You mentioned what you’re doing but they don’t really want to hear. (Sophia, female, 30s)

Sophia’s quote provides an example of the sequestration of climate-related death in everyday conversation (Mellor & Shilling, 1993); climate mortality is almost a taboo. Conversely, Tim felt that death was just not a matter of concern for most people in Britain because it was not personally relevant:

I don’t think the population is ready yet (to take direct action) [. . .] It’s not like Black rights where every individual in Birmingham Alabama was so impacted that they were going to turn out on the streets, because it was life and death to them. But climate change isn’t life and death to people today in Britain. (Tim, male, 50s)

Here Tim connects ideas of existential threat with issues of justice by contrasting British people’s lack of justice consciousness with the imperatives of the US civil rights movement, pointing to relative existential privilege in Britain. On the other hand, Freya agreed with many others in that climate change was a present absence, underpinned by a governmental level implicatory denial of death of distant others:

It’d be such a big change for people, and they would have to then admit that their governments are complicit in ecocide and genocide. It’s just too much I think for people to take on. (Freya, female, 20s)

As well as a tactic to deny responsibility for climate-related death and loss, for others the silence was inextricably connected to living, and with it the environmentally damaging practices which make life comfortable and convenient. Sophia points to others actively keeping climate at arm’s length:

It’s never the right moment actually, to have these conversations, I find. You’re always consciously judging the situation. It’s quite rare that I find the opportunity because other people aren’t in the same space as you, or they’re still resisting it, and trying to keep up their fairy tale existence. (Sophia, female, 30s)

In this quote Sophia recognises norms of conversation which work to maintain comfort and privilege. Staying silent helped prevent disruptions to ‘the good life’ and the self-identities it was entangled with (Willmott, 2000).

The above examples attribute climate silence to active avoidance by non-activist friends and family; normative silence was an outcome of resisting social change. But activists often silenced themselves in relationally specific situations. With older relatives, activists taboo-ised climate change partly because they felt senior people should be spared the discomfort of climate politics at their life stage; it was considered inappropriate to involve relatives who have fewer years ahead of them to enjoy life. For example, Patricia told me:

I think that generational issue is really difficult, like grandparents who fly all the time, haven’t changed their life-style, and who are like: well, I haven’t got much time left! And I can see where they’re coming from as well. (Patricia, female, 30s)

This quote illustrates that silence around climate change was a form of intergenerational emotion management against negative topics, and served as a discursive strategy to cope with the proximity of mortality in later life (Mellor & Shilling, 1993). However, this generational ordering of climate action could be seen as an intergenerational ‘discounting’, a practice reflected in climate policymaking in which the value of the present is given more weight than the value of the future (Elliott, 2022). This discounting works within a Western cultural conception of linear time, distinguishing the past from the future (Adam, 1996), and a future-oriented politics is deemed of little concern to older people today.

Maintaining silence: Concealing one’s activist self

Other relationally specific self-censoring arose when one’s antagonistic politics were an unwelcome mood dampener in group family practices, in which questions about consumption might unsettle what it means to enjoy ‘doing’ family festivities. Many participants spoke of needing to hide their feelings about climate to ‘keep everybody happy’, as Marius explained:

It’s delicate because I’ve got three brothers who I’m incredibly close to, and talking about family holidays, or stag dos, or weddings abroad. . . all of these things end up. . . where you go out for dinner and what you’re served for dinner if you’re eating together and stuff, it all becomes quite personal-political, and I don’t want to proselytise to my family about it! (Marius, male, 30s)

In talking about the ‘personal-political’, Marius was raising issues of alienated identity in particular settings. Supporting ideas by Ahmed (2010), this suggests that family members together are a powerfully normative force in marginalising the individual when their personal politics do not fit with the collective orientation towards positive affect. Similarly, Ruben’s diary entry of his recent camping trip with friends and family shows the collective power of the group in this regard:

Have to watch what I say about Extinction Rebellion as Owen works for Boeing! Hard to know what to do when it is bad manners to be concerned about the future of humanity. (Ruben, male, 50s)

This quote illustrates Ruben’s hiding of his activist self to uphold norms of positive conversation. Noticeable is his perceived greater risk of creating emotional discomfort brought about both by Owen’s job role and his and close personal association. In a setting outside that of family and friends where a relaxed atmosphere was not necessarily the goal, there might otherwise be an opportunity for serious debate about ‘the future of humanity’, as he put it.

To contextualise this study’s findings of concealing one’s activist self, strategic disidentification from radical activism within other contexts was evident across the dataset. Even though a large proportion of participants were involved in direct actions, many distanced themselves from a strident activist image in favour of a parent identity because they felt the milder image of ‘normal’ parents with ‘normal everyday concerns’ would be more effective in connecting with politicians and the public, particularly given recent negative media and public discourse around Extinction Rebellion direct actions (Howard, 2022). This was buttressed by a cultural backdrop of negative views of radical forms of social movement activism more generally (Roth, 2016). As an example, Ryan felt that the negatively stereotyped image imperilled his gravitas, so he chose to dress in a shirt and tie when giving public talks on climate to ‘avoid being seen as a crazy hippy’. Ridicule and negative stereotyping had been experienced directly by over half of the participants, who had received comments from the public, friends or acquaintances relating to a presumed lack of personal hygiene – for example one activist was laughed at by passers-by at a protest, who claimed she smelled bad, or had been ascribed labels such as ‘eco-warrior’ or ‘hippy’. A typical interaction of ridicule was given by Alexander, illustrated below from his diary record:

A friend of mine decided to strike back at an article I wrote without even reading it and say ‘You know the planets align every year to cause changes in climate’. She is the type to watch YouTube videos instead of reading a research paper. When I explained what she was referring to, she said ‘alright Scorpio’ (referring to astrology and my star sign). It was a bewildering experience. (Alexander, male, 30s)

Similar to the ‘OK Boomer’ phrase which is a mocking rejoinder to older people for being out of touch (Elliott, 2022), ‘alright Scorpio’ was an attempt to ridicule and belittle Alexander. I was told by many participants these encounters often made them feel alienated and ‘like a weirdo’, which caused them to play down their environmentalism because of a ‘worry you’ll lose friends over it’. Charlotte said she would rather ‘keep people on side’ than assert a strident activist self, elaborating: ‘I try and keep it quite brief. And I don’t say things like “if we just loved the trees!”.’ Charlotte had earlier told me she feels close to nature but wanted to avoid this as a reference point to disidentify from the much-derided stereotype of ‘tree-hugging’ environmentalists. This dissociation from part of oneself, as well as from a collective identity suggests that self-censoring and compromise were part of relational activism within everyday life to protect relationships, to avoid alienating others, and to ease one’s climate politics into normal conversations.

Additionally, concerns around revealing one’s climate politics related to a perceived risk of being called a hypocrite for less-than-perfect consumption practices, as Freya explained:

You need to be very strong, because it is so important! But if it’s just a situation where somebody says I’m taking a flight, I no longer make a point. I just say, ‘Oh that’s nice, where are you going?’ partly because I have also taken flights. (Freya, female, 20s)

Freya’s quote suggests she was experiencing tensions between expressing her justice politics and dealing with retaliation. Ridicule, stereotype labelling and attacking the environmentalist identity with accusations of hypocrisy could be interpreted as a form of backlash by those whose own actions (or inaction) are under scrutiny (Anderson, 2010). Ferree (2004) might even describe this as a form of ‘soft repression’: the ridicule deployed at the interactional level towards a movement’s collective identity in order to stigmatise and silence cultural challenges to the dominant status quo. Ferree distinguishes soft repression from conventional ‘hard’ forms by its non-violent use of power and informal, decentralised deployment. Adding to Ferree’s concept of soft repression by recalling Goffman’s importance of inclusive and involved conversations to maintain intimate bonds, we can consider the augmented power of soft repression within personal life settings: at the same time as social movements have been increasingly turning towards influencing civil society rather than the state (Ferree, 2004), fighting ridicule and negative stereotyping, and potentially losing friends through discomforting discussion is a structural challenge to overcome for the activist who seeks to mobilise others at the everyday level.

Negotiating silence: Using stealth tactics

Despite the barriers to broaching the topic of climate change, and perhaps resulting from degrees of soft repression, several participants had found creative ways to launder the subject of its discomfort and reduce the risk of resistance. By using ecologically oriented practices to act as an oblique portal to the topic – often using the body and health – or opportunities to socialise, a conversation seed could be planted. Participants spoke of cooking vegetarian food for guests and explaining its wide range of benefits, exemplifying cycling to work as a route to fitness, or even organising sociable film nights around ecological themes to ‘bring people together and offer opportunities to think about things’. These were referred to as ‘careful stealth tactics’ to engage people, to ‘slowly chip away’, ‘not push it too much’, and instead ‘tell a story to remove the taboo’ of climate change. It spoke to concerns around tensions between wanting to unsettle climate apathy, and the risks of invoking painful emotions of guilt, anxiety, and ultimately, dissent. Activists told me their overarching aim was to mobilise critical thinking around climate change, not make people feel bad and rebel.

Other techniques to lighten climate change – what Goffman (1967) would call preventing negative ‘face’ in conversation participants – included the use of humour. Humour was particularly effective in ameliorating the alienating ‘faulty’ interaction (Goffman, 1967) of inviting serious conversation. Marc (male, 50s) told me he teases his friend Bryn ‘in a jokey way’ about his regular meat intake, choosing to ‘demonstrate’ his own vegetarianism to avoid ‘breaking those bridges, those relationships’. This upbeat approach to relational climate activism was nonetheless effortful and ongoing, described as something ‘you’ve got to just keep working away at’. Fran and her partner Leah also used humour with relatives:

I talk to them about it in a fun way. Whereas before they just thought, oh a bunch of hippies, we tell them what actually happens, and they go, oh right! [chuckles]. Because they’ll see it in the media, and on the news, and the media will twist it and say they were violent. And we’ll say, no they were just sat locked onto barrels! The police got them a cup of tea and had a chat with them! [chuckles]. (Fran, female, 30s)

Fran’s form of climate talk was to dispel myths around climate direct actions, also serving to undermine negative environmentalist stereotyping. In this way she was managing her identity to increase her family members’ receptiveness to talking about the deeper issues at stake.

We can borrow Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) concept of bricolage, applied to environmentalism by Janet Lorenzen (2012) who described it in terms of creatively uniting different practices, materials or knowledge to get around a problem, to consider these examples of negotiating climate silence. But climate was viewed through the sustainability lens of making tweaks to the ways of doing life, rather than confronting its more fundamental politics of loss and death. Highlighting a neoliberal logic, this idea resonates with Eva Illouz’s (2007) observation that in recent decades intimate relationships have increasingly become the site of politically and economically informed bargaining and exchange. However, this poses questions about social change. Given the urgency of addressing climate change, we might ask whether this individualistic and piecemeal socialisation of climate change will enable the development of a critical perspective on climate politics and governance at pace.

Breaking climate silence: Risky killjoy-talk

Three of the 20 activists I interviewed provided instances where they had transgressed norms of polite conversation through what I call ‘killjoy-talk’. By this I mean intentionally adopting the role of Goffman’s (1967) faulty interactant to drag down the mood in an interaction, with the aim of disrupting everyday conversations that tend to perpetuate climate avoidance. As I will show in these examples, the participants reflected on the risks of performing their activism in ways which starkly articulated the seriousness of climate change or performed their environmental identities in potentially stereotypical ways. However, as with Ahmed’s (2010) feminist killjoy, the risks encountered by the environmentalist killjoy as an individual may be worthwhile to advance the collective politics of a movement.

Charlotte, a medic campaigning in her workplace for sustainable practices, documented in her diary an instance of killjoy-talk with a job-share colleague:

Diary: Had a meeting with Mike. I insisted sustainability should not be an add-on, not optional. Why is it unusual to be expressing the concern that without our ecosystem we don’t survive? Feel uncomfortable saying ‘we die’ without it, like a hippy/eco warrior in a setting where that doesn’t happen much. Risky. (Charlotte, female, 30s)

Here we can see how Charlotte felt a degree of embarrassment for using the stark statement ‘we die’, fearing conversational alienation in a setting where collaboration rather than confrontation was the norm. Charlotte’s reference to negative environmentalist stereotypes illustrates another dimension of perceived risk. However, the strategic imposition of climate life and death politics within the highly- controlled and rational-thinking hospital setting had the potential to be emotional dynamite to break through to the seriousness of climate change.

Marc also used the workplace as a setting for his climate activism. He gave an example where he was open with colleagues about attending a recent Extinction Rebellion protest, proudly explaining to them why getting arrested was ‘a good thing’. I probed Marc on the implications of this:

Interviewer: So, was telling them about your arrest a risk for your job?

Marc: Oh God yeah. Every year I have to sign a form saying I don’t have a criminal record. So, they could probably sack me, but I haven’t been charged, I was released pending investigation. (Marc, male, 50s)

For Marc, admitting a criminalised act in a workplace setting was risky but – as with Charlotte – self-disclosing in an environment where socially fitting in was the norm served as a political act, and a chance to start a conversation. As well as breaking norms of maintaining the professional ‘self’ in a work setting, Marc’s diary entry below showed he would also thrust the serious politics of climate life and death into office small talk:

Diary: Peter (colleague) asked how the protest went. Derek asked what it was about, and Peter said global warming. I reframed it as about the future of humanity.

This comment demonstrates Marc’s boldness to dramatise his perspective despite the risk of conversational alienation. Another participant, Rick, also confronted conversation and emotion norms to advance his justice politics. He recalled a moment some years ago, shortly after his daughter was born, when he used killjoy-talk to run starkly against the celebratory emotion norms of a new baby’s birth. He had said to his mother-in-law, ‘it would be irresponsible to have any more children because of global warming’, explaining:

It was so obvious to me that that was a thing not to say, like it was a really unacceptable thing to say [. . .] socially, and within my family’s culture, I had transgressed [chuckles]. (Rick, male, 40s)

Rick was referring here to mother-in-law’s puzzled reaction, and to his wife’s ‘horror’ at the uncomfortable moment. I interpreted Rick’s chuckle at the end of this statement as a sign he had reflected on the moral paradox of the ‘transgression’: he had caused his affective relations some emotional pain in expressing his wider social concerns.

Breaking silences head-on occurred when activists took risks with who, how and in what setting they raised the topic of climate change. The risks were of isolation or threats to professional standing. But this risk-taking was not a simple matter of courage; the risks inherent in interactional accountability are often connected to one’s gender (Hollander, 2018). Violating the normative expectations of a situation risks being discredited, and this is riskier for those who are expected to display gendered norms of feminised care and nurturing (Hollander, 2018). Feminists have argued that men are more likely to take physical and emotional risks than women (Lois, 2001) and are more likely to use ‘statements to open up topical talk’, which arises from their greater chance of being listened to by others (Fishman, 1978, cited in West, 1996, p. 359). Such statements are more likely to confidently reorient the conversational agenda (West, 1996). Risky killjoy-talk in this study was mostly performed within masculinised norms of self-assertion and ‘doing power in face-to-face interactions’ (West, 1996, p. 359), as well as the more self-oriented motive of being authentic to their ‘true’ self (Lyng & Matthews, 2007). Marc exploited his managerial position in the workplace, and Charlotte, who holds a high-status job as a medic, enjoyed a degree of authority in her work setting. For these situations, there is a lower risk of ridicule and social sanctions. The other key observation is that killjoy-talk was most often performed with people outside the highest-stakes frame of very close relationships – evidenced by Marc’s and Charlotte’s encounters with work colleagues.

Conclusion

If richer nations are to respond to the climate crisis in a globally just way, we need to have deeper and more challenging public conversations about it. Silence around the moral responsibilities of climate change does nothing to challenge the incremental top-down technoeconomic ‘solutions’ currently put forward by government, largely seen by the climate movement as inadequate in the face of devastating environmental conditions for the world’s poorest (Nightingale et al., 2020).

This article set out to understand the conditions for social silence around climate justice in everyday life, and the ways in which activists as political agents seek to break through discursive barriers to normalise the topic with friends and family. The article also set out to understand what the implications are for activists’ personal relationships. The study’s location in the UK cultural context has found that a cultural tendency to sequester mortality structured the discursive resistance to moral issues around climate change. The discomforts of climate’s life and death politics were a powerfully normative force within kinship settings where comfort, affection and conviviality were expected. Following Ahmed (2010), a feminist reading of the silenced environmentalist who drags down the mood makes visible the ideology of familial happiness as a mechanism to normatively define what is deemed to be a social ‘good’ within a particular neoliberal frame. I suggest that this ordering of conversation away from the inconvenient truths of death, oppression and injustice is underpinned by, and helps to reproduce, climate ‘new denialism’ (Buranyi, 2019; Daub et al., 2021) – that is, the governmental and corporate delay tactics to obstruct transformational but disruptive change, instead offering technoeconomic ‘solutions’ which are silent on the justice issues of climate change (Lamb et al., 2020).

Climate change within personal relationships was a nexus of possible conflict and risk. In the face of a cultural negative stereotyping of environmentalists, activists struggled to manage their identities within personal interactions due to the risk of ridicule, isolation and destabilisation of relationships. This often necessitated a backgrounding of one’s politics, or an adoption of humour within interactions to remove the ‘sting’ of a potentially depressing topic. Group family gatherings were particularly powerful in this regard, within which normative expectations of going along with the positive mood could silence the individual when killjoy-talk could threaten the sense of occasion. The actual or expected ridicule and stereotyping represented a percolation and amplification of ‘soft repression’ into personal life. This informal and decentralised social control polices normative boundaries of so-called acceptable identities at the interpersonal level, and serves to limit or silence the ideas and discussion of a collective political position (Ferree, 2004). Recent reinforcing narratives of negative climate activist stereotypes by powerful public figures in the UK government to limit public acceptance of disruptive protest tactics underscore the ability of soft repression to work as a form of social control. In the case of this study, the effect of soft repression is to water down the urgency and seriousness of climate change within relations of intimacy.

Discursive obstruction of climate talk could be circumvented and negotiated with a range of creative face and relationship-saving social practices. These aligned with the ideals of sustainability which attempt to balance different social, environmental and economic priorities. Breaking silences head-on on the other hand did not entail such diplomacy, and instead mobilised the environmentalist killjoy as a gendered risk-taker to break through norms of convivial conversation. The environmentalist killjoy can be situated within consumption-based notions of ‘the good life’, designed by capitalist institutions and architecture which socially mandate optimism and faith in the promised happiness of goods and services, while pathologising pessimistic affect (Busk, 2016; McKenzie, 2016). While this context works to stifle dissent and re-entrench goals and practices towards ‘life as normal’ and ‘business as usual’, it appears activists have identified chinks in this armour to normalise climate talk with friends and family and hence keep climate change on the table as a political topic for future discussion.

The article adds to knowledge on everyday relational forms of climate justice activism and its links to the broader puzzle of high public concern about the climate but low engagement in action (Whitmarsh & Capstick, 2018). The findings support previous work by Hards (2013) and Hauxwell-Baldwin (2013) on the situation-specific hiding of environmentalist identities, and to social movement literature on processes of disidentification. This insight into the management of activist identities adds complexity to previous studies of discomforting political talk with friends and family which have suggested self-censoring is an ethical act (e.g. Davies, 2021; Norgaard, 2011). The findings in this article have made visible the false boundary between the public and private realms, and highlighted the need to maintain analytical links between the two. Affective relationships are not shut off from the cultural codes and discourses of wider society and are a powerful agent in shaping climate conversations. This implies it is a lot to expect environmentalists to effect change with friends and family. We must be mindful of the multi-level and situated power relations within and beyond personal life which both reproduce and disrupt silences. Moreover, there are likely to be inequalities based on class, race and ethnicity which play a part in conversation norms. This study has helped to understand how conversational norms may be unsettled, but it is not known to what extent these influences effected longer term or broader change in discourses and practices. This was beyond the scope of this study but presents an opportunity for longitudinal research. Further research should also consider a more diverse activist sample, or better still, to focus on raced and classed climate activists to understand the specific contextual and social identity barriers to normalising climate talk.