17 A Festival of Action: Climate Justice and Everyday Activism in Higher Education
Jenna Condiea and David R. Coleb
aSchool of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University, Australia
bSchool of Education, Western Sydney University, Australia
Abstract
Human-induced climate change is an established scientific fact with devastating consequences for human society and all planetary systems, potentially driving a sixth mass extinction. Yet most people continue their daily lives, seemingly detached from the urgency of the crisis. Meanwhile, universities have become sites where students are burdened by debt, competition and market logics that, alongside heightened restrictions on free speech and organising, constrain possibilities for collective action. This chapter examines the “Festival of Action” at Western Sydney University as a case study of resistance against these market constraints and an experiment in cultivating everyday activism for climate justice in higher education. Emerging from a transdisciplinary curriculum innovation project underpinned by student–staff partnerships, the Festival was created as a mechanism to transform campus life into a space where solidarity, community and creative resistance can flourish. Through event-based pedagogy, ranging from curriculum-linked activities to art, storytelling, climate action stalls and reuse initiatives, the Festival creates entry points into activism, connecting university life with broader social and climate justice movements. We argue that such spaces are vital for enabling students and staff to think and act beyond the dominant modes of 21st century capitalist colonialism, if we are to confront the accelerating plunge into climate chaos.
Keywords
higher education, everyday activism, student-staff coalition, climate justice
The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the eighteenth century has had far-reaching consequences that are still with us today (More, 2002). Capital was deployed to fund industrial processes that burned coal and exploited human labour to operate machines. These processes have duplicated and multiplied globally, entangled with ongoing colonial expansion, resource extraction, and the violent oppression of Indigenous peoples and occupation of their lands. The accumulation of wealth in Europe and its settler colonies was built not only on fossil fuels and labour, but also on land theft, slavery, genocide, ecocide and the epistemicide of Indigenous knowledges (Stein & de Oliveira Andreotti, 2025). Capitalist, colonising forces continue to shape our present condition, in which complex capital investment markets evolve to seek profit from any source of human endeavour, including those reliant on fossil fuels and other vital resources (see, for example, Poulantzas, 2018).
While there are opportunities for green, renewable and net zero innovation in this global picture of interrelated capital (see, for example, Cole & Baghi, 2024), the integration of business processes and labour, which are the overwhelming consequences of the Industrial Revolution and colonialism, negates the importance of environmental impacts on everyday (profit-driven) activity. As Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti (2025) argue, universities themselves are caught within this system, too often striving to restore “business as usual” rather than reckoning with their complicity in ecological and social harm and breakdown. Thus, students (and indeed staff), who are frequently aware and passionate about issues of social and climate justice, are forced to navigate between surviving financially in increasingly hostile and predatory working conditions and acting for a just, liveable future.
One might reply that negotiations between environmental action and financial survival should not be so stark. Yet this predicament currently determines climate inaction and the inability to organise communally and to make progress on, for example, lowering the emissions of greenhouse gases (cf., Gillingham & Stock, 2018). Large and widespread emitters only act to lower emissions if there are financial incentives to do so (or sanctions if they do not), and thus we are left with a situation in which capital and its deployments for profit are interwoven into, for example, the very desires of students to do something about the current climate crises in their everyday lives (Capstick et al., 2014; Schwanen, Banister & Anable, 2012). Students may not always have access to, or be made aware of, the historical and corporate processes structuring the anthropogenic crisis. Yet they become entwined in these harmful processes through merely going to university (doing knowledge-labour), taking part in social media (infused with capital- and consumer-desire), and wanting to have a safe and prosperous future (which often entails reproducing the capitalist-colonial status quo). In sum, the objective of this chapter is to describe an escape from the complete entwinement of students (and staff) in the contemporary situation that links capitalism and colonialism with planetary destruction and the jeopardising of human and more-than-human futures.
Case Study: The Festival of Action – Building Everyday Activism on Campus for Climate Justice
Western Sydney University (WSU), situated on unceded Darug, Dharawal, Eora, and Wiradjuri lands in so-called Australia, is a multi-campus institution located in one of the continent’s most climate-impacted regions. Students and local communities face extreme heat events, worsening air quality, the depletion of the natural environment, socio-spatial and socio-economic inequalities, and rising living costs. Like many universities, WSU is simultaneously experiencing the globalised pressures of corporatisation, marketisation, digitalisation and the controlling of space for dissent and protest. It is against this backdrop that the Festival of Action was founded in 2022, as an attempt to maintain the university as a site of “everyday activism” (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010) where students and staff can collectively address important social and environmental issues and other causes beyond their classrooms and curriculum.
From Curriculum Reform to Activist Third Space
The foundations for the Festival were laid in a university-wide curriculum development initiative called the 21C Project. Through student‒staff partnerships, the 21C Project’s aim was to develop new transdisciplinary curriculum offerings available to all students. The project centred on the “future of work” as a guiding framework for curriculum development. Some teams leaned into this framework, embracing a neoliberal, enterprise-based approach to curriculum design and jobs. Other teams did not.
The Future Thinkers Challenge student–staff team, one of five Challenges within the project, refused to accept the “future of work” as an unquestioned orientation for their curriculum. Rather, they committed to embedding equity and justice at the heart of their transdisciplinary curriculum, insisting that capital and jobs are frequently at odds with the survival of humanity and the care of planetary systems. For the team, the “future of work” was not a solution but a symptom of the problem: a capitalist project driving further exploitation, extraction and worker inequalities. In its place, they imagined and worked towards futures grounded in care, community and collective liberation. From this vision emerged two new transdisciplinary minors: 1) Equitable Technologies and 2) Climate Justice, to support graduates with the critical tools, political awareness and skills needed to dismantle unjust systems and to build alternatives for the future.
The project team, a coalition of academic staff and paid Student Curriculum Partners, quickly realised the limitations of new transdisciplinary curriculum development within a rigid university infrastructure that remains fixed to discipline fields. Furthermore, the project was limited to only being able to use existing subjects to comprise the minors, adding “curiosity pods” into those subjects as the only way to generate the new curriculum required by the project. Introducing climate and technology justice content into already overcrowded programs was too slow and was too disconnected from the lived experiences of social and climate injustices in the Western Sydney region. Therefore, a different approach was needed, one that would move beyond content delivery to transform campus culture, build solidarity, and connect students with real-world movements for climate justice. The Festival of Action was born as a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) for activism on campus: a place where students could experiment with activist identities, meet others who cared about the same issues, and learn how collective action could challenge systems of injustice. The third space is important to the ongoing revitalisation and maintenance of the Festival because it provides a purposeful venue outside of the structures of the formal educational space, yet qualitatively different from the home and leisure worlds of the students.
Festival of Action 2022: Finding People, Causes, and Purpose
The first Festival in 2022 was a gathering of people, stalls and causes to enable students to “find your people, find your cause, find your purpose” and showcased the transdisciplinary curriculum developed by the 21C Project, with a focus on the minors that specifically responded to the climate crisis. It was a post-COVID-19 lockdown attempt to reactivate in-person events on campus situated in an outdoor space for social distancing. It brought staff, students and external partners such as the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) together. AYCC had a stall and a signup sheet for their western Sydney chapter, a key goal for them is to build their communities in the most climate impacted Australian region.
The Festival used art, storytelling, research demonstrations and hands-on activities to make activism accessible and invited participants to think differently about climate. Participants painted “climate futures” alongside local artists, joined citizen science projects such as 1 Million Turtles to protect eastern long neck turtles and their habitats, explored sustainable living practices from cloth nappies to plant-based diets, played interactive climate policy games, and listened to stories from young people in western Sydney already living with climate impacts. Petitions were signed, letters to MPs were sent, new members joined the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), the key partner that joined us at this event, and wide-ranging conversations flourished. However, take up for the transdisciplinary minors was almost non-existent. The Festival did not manage to get many students enrolled in its transdisciplinary minors, but it did get climate on many people’s agendas.
Building Bridges Beyond Campus
Later that year, the Festival team deepened their connection with broader youth-led climate justice movements through PowerShift 2022, AYCC’s national climate action summit in Brisbane. By advocating for and securing the university’s $30,000 sponsorship of the PowerShift conference, the team went on to gain additional funding support for AYCC’s NSW Training Weekend, which was located at WSU Parramatta City Campus the following year. The Festival team therefore secured material support and enabled student participation in youth-led climate justice.
At AYCC’s events, participants engage in intensive training on grassroots organising, campaign strategy and justice-oriented leadership. The events also centred First Nations leadership and built solidarity across diverse communities, including people of colour, queer, gender-diverse, and disabled activists. The Festival team contributed to Powershift 2022 with a workshop from their Future Thinkers curriculum on “using social media for climate justice”. This involvement with AYCC extended the Festival’s impact beyond campus, bridging the gap between institutional sustainability rhetoric and tangible climate action.
Festival of Action Evolves: 2023–2025
The Festival of Action continued to evolve in 2023 as the “Climate Justice Now” one-day event. This event was successful, with organised talks, forums, panels, workshops, a plant-based lunch and stalls. Students, staff and community members came together on the university’s Parramatta City Campus. The event moved one step closer towards creating a coalition for climate justice, but the question was asked by the coalition members: what would hold that coalition together? We needed a hook to bring people in, and a mechanism for holding them together.
Returning in 2025, the Festival ran as a clothes and resources swap, responding to both environmental and social justice issues, tackling fast fashion and textile waste while helping to ease cost-of-living pressures on students and staff. Campus space was used to exchange good-quality pre-loved clothing, books, and household items. Alongside the swap, skill-sharing activations on mending, weaving and upcycling helped build repair cultures and challenge throwaway consumerism. Conversations about the climate crisis, inequality and collective solutions unfolded over sewing needles and the plant-based lunch break. For many attendees, the swap made climate action feel tangible and doable: it offered an entry point into activism rooted in care, mutual aid, everyday change-making and community. Consequently, there appear to be many possibilities in using the swap-and-reuse initiatives as a mechanism for societal (re)building, which can well support a coalition for climate justice at Western Sydney University.
Outcomes, Impact, and Ongoing Challenges
Reuse and repair events can generate a measurable impact: hundreds of participants, thousands of items saved from landfill, petitions signed and campaigns strengthened. These outcomes feed into WSU’s Times Higher Education Impact Rankings submissions, where the university has ranked #1 in the world for sustainability for 4 consecutive years. Festival of Action’s contributions align with SDG 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals), showcasing how civic engagement, sustainability and education can intersect. This is one way that the Festival of Action can sustain its organisation and gain institutional support, by remaining key to the university’s rankings.
Still, sustaining the Festival is difficult. Funding is precarious and dependent upon senior leaders and available budgets. Student organisers cycle out as contracts end or they graduate. Academic staff lack a recognised workload for community-engaged activism. Furthermore, institutional risk-aversion or palatability reframes political action as “engagement” or “greenwashing”, potentially diluting its edge.
Yet the Festival demonstrates that event-based pedagogy can create powerful entry points for university communities into activism, making climate justice feel urgent, accessible and joyful. Everyday activism, whether swapping clothes, sharing skills, or signing petitions, keeps momentum alive between everyday contexts and large-scale protests and campaigns. In addition, while the purpose and significance of rankings can be critiqued, the Festival shows that they can be leveraged to build institutional support for initiatives grounded in climate justice and social care.
The Festival continues to insist that activism belongs in higher education, not at its margins, and that small, everyday acts of collective resistance are needed to spark the deeper transformations our institutions, communities and planet urgently need.
Discussion and Conclusion
The Festival of Action represents a bottom-up, immanent approach (Cole, 2013; 2014) to community building, curriculum making, and climate justice on campus. Top-down perspectives treat curriculum as products and students as clients, blending with the dominant capitalist-colonial ideologies, which underpin the “intersecting crises” (Ang, 2021) we face today. Contrastingly, the bottom-up approaches to curriculum development and higher education are more unpredictable and precarious, but more personally meaningful, making space to take climate justice seriously, not as abstract content but as lived practices. Through initiatives like the Festival of Action, knowledges and skills are shared and emerge in real time, assessed by their impacts, whether that’s addressing climate change or cultivating resilient community strategies for survival and care.
There are several ways that the ongoing success and maintenance of the Festival can be theorised. The first goes back to the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, and the systems, consequences and repercussions that it has spawned. First, Marx’s analysis of alienation and the metabolic rift that ensued highlights how industrial and capitalist labour alienated workers from their labour and from nature (Saito, 2017). Today, digitalisation and social media continue and exacerbate this disconnection (Jordhus-Lier, Houeland & Ellingvåg, 2022). The Festival directly addresses such alienation by providing a “third space” (Bhabha, 1994) where students and staff can collectively identify and challenge capitalist exploitation and ecological harm.
Another theoretical lens that offers possibilities for the Festival is through the social ecology of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin (1982; 2022) theorised that there is a correspondence between the rifts, problems, hierarchies and misunderstandings in human society, and the ways in which humans treat and live in and with nature. Bookchin was dismayed by the large-scale failures of twentieth-century communism, and looked to the ways in which industrialisation and power-based bureaucracies corrupted the higher goals of organising small-scale and ecologically sustainable society and living in harmony with nature (and each other). Rather, Bookchin (1991) theorised a mode of democracy wherein all social decisions are debated and interrogated by the community, and all members of a society have a say in its direction and operations. In contrast, in the contemporary situation, most people now live in a representative democracy, wherein they vote for the parties of political leaders, and after which they have no say in the decisions that are being made for them by the government. In sum, the Festival can take heed of Bookchin’s (1982; 1991; 2022) social ecology and look to define a new type of society through its “reimagining of university” (Stein & de Oliveira Andreotti, 2025) and community operations, that incorporates socially and ecologically harmonious modes of life into its functioning. In this way, the Festival can move outside of the present-day lines of unsustainable capitalist, colonial power and domination and refresh the aspirations of university communities.
The Festival also embodies what Chatterton and Pickerill (2010) call “everyday activism”: small, significant practices, such as swapping clothes, repairing items or signing petitions, that resist capitalist and colonial norms while prefiguring just and sustainable futures. These practices sustain momentum between large-scale protests and systemic campaigns. The project further aligns with socio-technically just pedagogies (Swist et al., 2024), which advocate for relational, equitable curriculum-making in student‒staff coalitions that are responsive to systemic injustices. By weaving together everyday activism, socially just pedagogies and structural critique, the Festival demonstrates how higher education can serve as a site for cultivating activist coalitions, connecting everyday acts with systemic transformation, and enacting pedagogies of justice and survival.
Author Note
Jenna Condie 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0811-0517
David Cole https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3966-1247
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jenna Condie. Email: j.condie@westernsydney.edu.au.
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the work and dedication of the Festival of Action team, comprising Western Sydney University students, staff, and community partners.
SDG Alignment
Goal 13: Climate action
Goal 17: Partnerships for the goals
Cite This Chapter
Attribution
Research Integrity Statement
Ethics approval was not required for this publication as it does not report primary research involving human participants, identifiable human data, or animals.
Jenna Condie and David Cole are employed by Western Sydney University, which has an interest in the subject matter discussed. This role did not influence the selection or presentation of content.
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