Summary

How Dare You? Whether you are concerned or not about our current socio-environmental condition, there are good chances this question sounds familiar to you. There are even small chances that it just made you blush. Are you reading this on a plane? Shame on you! Did you just buy something on Amazon? How dare you! This is exactly what this dissertation is about: exploring the politics of eco-shaming.

The end of the second decade of the 21st century is best memorable for those concerned with our socio-environmental condition. Under the auspices of Greta Thunberg, climate protests and school strikes ignited across Europe, including in Belgium. The protests laid ground for eco-shaming to emerge. As “Greta Thunberg weaponised shame in an era of shamelessness” (The Washington Post, 2019), it became clear that eco-shaming had become meaningful. It affects. It strikes a nerve. It moves people. It is controversial. It rattles the politics of the environment.

Triggered by this “new global sensibility” (Mkono & Hughes, 2020), this inquiry explores the politics of eco-shaming. First, it explores how the politics of eco-shaming unfold; it unravels eco-shaming’s functioning as discourse, desire, device and dissent, as well as how this curious entanglement of functionings embodies dynamics of contestation, engagement with and disengagement from sustainability transformations.

Neologisms tend to be informative of the zeitgeist. Today’s environmental movement in the affluent West can be defined by two, apparently paradoxical, tendencies. On the one hand, there is a tendency towards hyperrealism: a taste for a science-based, universal and monolithic diagnosis of the problem from which to deduce straightforward, global, and evidence-based solutions for it. On the other hand, there is a tendency towards hyperromanticism: a taste for the emotional and personal escape to spaces where the question of power relations and collective action is effaced.

Hence, secondly, the politics of eco-shaming are situated within the larger politics of the environment, within the contemporary zeitgeist. The politics of eco-shaming are found to incorporate the zeitgeist, inscribing themselves into the tendencies towards hyperromanticism and hyperrealism, yet without being entirely understandable from these tendencies. Instead, the politics of eco-shaming are found to move between, challenge, and surpass the zeitgeist in complex and ambiguous ways. As such, the politics of eco-shaming are found to be a way of both engagement with and disengagement from sustainability transformations, of both politicisation and depoliticisation of socio-environmental changes, and of both individualisation and collectivisation dynamics of responsibilities for sustainability action.

The interpretive research approach taken, which focuses on the socio-political imagination, similarly attempts to move beyond the academic skim of the zeitgeist; it challenges the academic hyperrealism portraying science as neutral and research as the execution of rigid methodological procedures, and turns away from the academic hyperromanticism predominantly interested in the individual and behavioural effects of eco-emotions.

This exploration of the politics of eco-shaming attempts to provide insights for collectively grappling with the entrenchment of our environmentally high-impact societies meanwhile opening up possibilities for more sustainable futures.