“An active academia for peace and sustainability” Hattle et al. (2025), and about constructive hope and doubt (Marlon et al., 2019)
After following the journey of my voting letter in the tracking app for more than a week and seeing that it did not make it to Sunday’s election on time, here are some things that give me hope today. First, and importantly, seeing how Kiel, where my letter should have gone, has voted even though my vote could not be counted. But then also thinking about what I can do going forward, and that I made the time to read two articles.
The first one by Hattle et al. (2025) is about “an active academia for peace and sustainability.” Hattle et al. (2025) discuss that academics often feel that becoming an activist will come at the cost of their academic credibility, but that the evidence suggests otherwise and that the public wants more, not less, activist engagement from academics. If people’s research shows that we need transformation in society, it makes them more credible if they act in line with what their research suggests. “Academics adopting and advocating for the changes their research proposes can be seen as a professional and moral responsibility“. They write that “academics can no longer resort to only publishing papers, and clenching fists in pockets. Instead, there is a need to consider how to make best use of academic knowledge and creativity to support diverse activism: in board rooms, with corporate leaders, with politicians, youth organisations, universities, and in the streets. These activities should be grounded in research, but may still risk being regarded as threatening to academic credibility. Academics should be prepared for, and find novel ways to engage with, both tension and animosity.”
(I really appreciate that they, despite calling for more engagement, acknowledge that in the current system, people are often already wearing too many different hats, and that this can affect mental health and general well-being. They warn that “a willingness to engage widely outside areas of expertise should be approached intentionally and with care“.)
But what I find empowering in this article is that they appeal to an academic identity of someone who is creative. “In the pursuit of a safe and just future, these crises [the interlinked climate, biodiversity and peace crises] need more activism, in forms that are creative and that challenge norms, that trigger our imagination and appeal to a willingness to act“. They give many historical examples of activism that included approaches “that had been combined in innovative ways, were consciously designed to carefully use legal loopholes, or were carried out to appeal to a sense of imagination and feelings of wonder“. “Protests in the streets must constantly evolve and diversify to receive sympathy—they must avoid doing something that people have seen before and become numb to“. Developing something like that sounds like fun, like it gives new energy, new hope!
But what to do? The Social Change Lab recently published a report on “Understanding the impact of “low action logic” protests” (But they used GPT-4 to code qualitative data — you know what I think about that…). They find that
- protests that appear illogical (e.g. throwing soup at famous paintings to protest climate change) gain more media attention than those that follow a clear rationale (e.g. blocking a runway to keep planes grounded). Makes sense, they are the more interesting stories.
- higher disruptiveness leads to more donations. Interesting!
- media coverage also drives donations—more headlines, more support. Makes sense.
But the fact that more illogical protests gain more media attention, and then more support, is kinda making me even more curious. This seems to be an interesting challenge to apply that creativity to!
The next article then, Marlon et al. (2019), is on “How hope and doubt affect climate change mobilization.” They investigate what makes people hopeful or doubtful that we can collectively tackle climate change. Generally, they find a lack of hope, but when they find hope, they find two types:
- Constructive hope, which is typically about seeing that you are not alone, that others start acting or talking or believing, that collective awareness is rising
- False hope, which is the belief that some bigger power than us, for example God or nature, will solve the problem, so we ourselves don’t need to do anything.
Additionally, they find two types of doubts:
- Constructive doubts are concerns that we won’t get our stuff together to do enough to address the problem
- Fatalistic doubts are beliefs that we cannot do anything about the problem anyway, even if we wanted to, because our, and the planet’s, fate is in the hands of God or Mother Nature, or that it is already too late anyway.
The two types of hope and doubt can then appear in people in different combinations. A combination of false hope and fatalistic doubt may lead to avoidance, distancing, and inaction.
But people who have both constructive hope and constructive doubt, hoping that we will reduce climate change while recognizing that we aren’t doing enough yet, are most likely to take action. And this could potentially be influenced! For example by communicating reasons for constructive hope and by limiting stories that might lead to fatalistic doubt. While we need to keep stories connected to, and keeping up awareness about, the threat of climate change (or more generally, an unsustainable world), it is important to focus more on the process than on the progress that has already happened (so that people don’t just start relying on “it’ll be fixed soon anyway, so I don’t need to get involved”), on reasons for constructive rather than fatalistic doubts.
Stories that could support constructive hope are, for example “Awareness is rising!”, “Efforts are being made!”, “There are realistic solutions to reduce climate change impacts!”, “There is a rise of clean energy!”. Good stories focus on seeing others being or becoming active (especially locally — if your neighbours, friends, family start having solar panels on their roofs, it will make you consider whether that is actually a good idea!), how the social norms are changing and awareness is growing, how reducing global warming has many positive sides in addition to not going into (as bad) a climate catastrophe. The authors write that “highlighting pro-environmental actions also directly counters common doubts about climate change, such as that humans are innately apathetic and greedy, or that change is too difficult or costly.” And I find that point so important; we need to keep believing in ourselves and other people. Yesterday I wrote about being one’s best-loved self in the context of generous scholarship. But we should think that concept so much wider; and ask ourselves and others what our best-loved self would be doing in this situation. Possibly slow down for a while, or recover and heal, but definitely not give up! And use my creativity, as a generous scholar, a generous human, to come up with stuff that aligns with who I want to be, and make the world a better place. The process is the point.
I had thought I wanted the image below as featured image on this post, but I then decided to go with one that makes me feel even more hopeful. A view of the horizon and cold water! :-D
Hattle, A., Flores, C., Ningrum, D., Blasiak, R., Bengtsson, F., & Österblom, H. (2025). An active academia for peace and sustainability. Peace and Sustainability, 100004.
Marlon, J. R., Bloodhart, B., Ballew, M. T., Rolfe-Redding, J., Roser-Renouf, C., Leiserowitz, A., & Maibach, E. (2019). How hope and doubt affect climate change mobilization. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 20.
Reading Pleasants et al. (2023, 2024) on technoskepticism - Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching says:
[…] the thought of any other approach. Someone will invent something, and that will fix everything (false hope that does not lead to action, as I wrote about earlier today). We therefore ultimately decided to […]