Senior Research Seminar with Dr Andrea Pia (LSE)

Scientist Rebellion, the international organisation of climate activists with a scientific background, recently asked: "What's the point of documenting in ever greater detail the catastrophe we face, if we're not willing to do anything about it?" Beginning with this provocation, this paper investigates barriers to collective action on climate change by juxtaposing ethnographic research conducted within climate justice youth movements in Italy with the broader anthropological corpus on sustainability practitioners’ complacency with the climate predicament. Through this lens, the paper illuminates how inaction requires subtle forms of emotional and imaginative editing that normalise collective inadequacy for what ‘change’ means in ‘climate change’. It reveals affective intensities—such as the surplus enjoyment found in horror and glee— foundational to the power of denial and disavowal in the crisis unfolding. The paper captures this affective posture through the images of editing, erasure, and proofing: performative gestures that allow climate-concerned subjects to enregister the most disquieting implications of ecoclimatic collapse in worldmaking projects of self-defence. Anthropologists should recognise a familiar application of their expertise in this defensive move and instead assist the conceptual operations needed to radicalise popular mobilisation on the climate.

Andrea E. Pia is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), the co-editor of China as Context: Anthropology, Post-globalisation and the Neglect of China (Manchester University Press, 2025) and the translator of the Italian edition of 中国人类学史 (Renmin University Press, 2008). His essays have appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Cultural Anthropology, and the Journal of Political Ecology, among others. He is the creator of the interactive digital ethnography The Long Day of the Young Peng.