Rising Against the Tide: Resisting and Repurposing Hegemonic Tools to Promote Environmental Action

Environmental social scientist Urooj Raja explores how to promote environmental action through the repurposing of six hegemonic forces - anthropocentrism, extractivism, capitalism, legal hegemony, technofixes, and imaginative hegemony - drawing upon and offering practical insights rooted in both everyday actions and contemporary resistance studies. This book delves into the concept of adaptive resilience, through which climate and environmental actors (CEAs) resist or repurpose these hegemonic forces by leveraging a combination of firsthand experiences, knowledge, networks, and skills.Raja argues that CEAs lean on adaptive resilience to resist and sometimes repurpose hegemonic forces and tools, which, when left unchallenged, often impede attempts to combat environmental inaction and climate change by design.The author addresses the complexity and contradictions of how CEAs have engaged in contemporary climate action in the face of oppression, cautioning against a reliance on "purity so