Kelvin Mason

Becoming Citizen Green: prefigurative politics, autonomous geographies, and hoping against hope

Academics are interested in the nexus of citizenship and environment in relation to other strategies for promoting sustainable development. Environmental activists are interested in effective means of being political. The acts of the global justice movement give rise to an alterity constituting a prefigurative green citizenship. Cosmopolitan but grounded, this green citizenship is unbounded in space, time, or materiality. Its primary virtue is justice as a participatory politics of the common good. A second virtue is informed stewardship of nature. Enfolding irony and spurning practices or habits in favour of acts and rupture, a multifaceted ‘creativity’ is a third virtue. These virtues are united by the principle of hope as the ecotopian foundation for defiant resistance. Framed by location, being, relation,au and imagination, green citizenships is analysed spatially via auto-ethnographic narratives of participation in the global justice movement.

'Us and us': Faslane 30 and academic direct action

Between 9 June and 9 July 2012, Faslane Peace Camp celebrated its thirtieth birthday by facilitating 30 days of non-violent direct action (NVDA) against nuclear weapons at Faslane naval base, Scotland. As part of this month of action we convened an academic seminar, which took place at the main (North) gate of the base on Friday 6 July. Our seminar built on an emerging tradition of academic seminars staged as NVDAs, notably two blockades which took place from 1 October 2006 as part of Faslane 365, a year of daily protests at the base (see Zelter 2008, Vinthagen et al. 2012). Stellan Vinthagen and Justin Kenrick developed the academic seminar blockade as a manifestation of the notion of ‘critique in action’: