Hope can seem a scarce commodity, but Karen Nairn has seen it, witnessed it.
Here’s what it looked like: "I saw a stage set up with musicians performing, then a little later, as I walked further along, two young women were taking sandwiches around the crowd of people, followed by a man with a box of fruit to distribute. There were areas with heaps of volunteers making sandwiches, preparing hangi food, cups of tea and biscuits, and there was a coffee caravan where a koha was all that was needed."
Prof Nairn is describing Ihumatao, in 2019, days after the small group of people occupying the disputed land near Tāmaki Makaurau-Auckland — earmarked for an upmarket housing development — had been evicted by police.
Prof Nairn has recorded the events in her new book, Fierce Hope, which investigates how the children of the neoliberal revolution, those born into the world shaped by Rogernomics and its successors, are engaging together, politically, to take up the challenges laid down for them.
What she found is a complicated picture, but ultimately hopeful, a generation often dismissed as politically disengaged — at least as far as electoral politics goes — are actually pretty active, working together across a whole range of issues to make a better world.
They are doing it despite what look like some pretty long odds.
Prof Nairn is a youth researcher, based at the University of Otago’s College of Education, where she occupies a sun-trap of an office on Union St.
The small, tidy office — blinds on the north windows lowered against the sun, the east windows open to the breeze — has a desk and a small round meeting table. It’s a workspace for one person. But that’s not how the professor rolls.
Her book, based on several years of Marsden Fund research is a collaboration with four other researchers — Judith Sligo, Carisa R. Showden, Kyle R. Matthews and Joanna Kidman — who spread out across six activist groups to look at "youth activism in Aotearoa", as the book’s subtitle explains. It expands on her earlier book Children of Rogernomics: A neoliberal generation leaves school, which was also collaboratively produced. Both books contribute to the Young Activists Research Project, of which she is the principal investigator.
They all work on big issues, climate change, decolonisation, prison reform, gender rights and sexual violence, the sorts of issues that can sometimes seem intractable and defy anyone to hold out hope.
But as the protectors of Ihumātao discovered on that big weekend, there’s always the chance.
Prof Nairn says her book is a challenge to the notion hope is a diminishing quantity in our troubled world.
"Yeah, it is," she says. "There is this idea that when the news is so grim that it would be understandable to despair and there is an Australian academic who has written about the shrinking distribution of hope in neoliberal societies."
In those places it’s possible to see it as the preserve of the privileged to have hope about their future.
However, indigenous activists have kept up the struggle for land and culture despite long histories of confiscation and marginalisation, and then there is climate change, which young people talk about in apocalyptic terms while doing much of the hard work of rallying the response.
"So hope becomes this really interesting concept to explore and it encompasses ideas about vision and inspiration," Prof Nairn says.
The hope the professor is talking about is not some untethered, naive fancy. The stakes are too high for the causes on which the activist groups are engaged and the prospect of failure too painful for that.
As one of the people at InsideOut Kōaro, which focuses on making schools safe for the rainbow community, told the researchers: "You have to have some level of hope to believe that anything would improve ... It’s not a distant hope of utopia, but recognising that here are things that we need to fix, that we can fix, that we should work on."
One of the Protect Ihumātao activists addressed a similar conundrum: "Can I accept that people will hurt each other in this world? And at the same time as accepting that, can I also know that there is a possibility that things could be otherwise?"
And activists in the Auckland chapter of Generation Zero interviewed by the researchers were pragmatic about what they might achieve on an issue as big and unbounded as climate change. Despite their national organisation pulling off the big win of the Zero Carbon Act, they remained prepared to make slow, painstaking progress if that was what was required — and celebrate the small wins when they came.
What these people are doing is "hoping critically", Prof Nairn says.
For example, she says, that means knowing the news about climate change is bad, and the evidence is governments are not taking action soon enough, but having the determination to take action anyway.
In the case of indigenous lands, there is the long history of failed or inadequate redress, but that didn’t stop the people of Ihumatao from taking a stand against a corporation as powerful as Fletcher and its housing development plan.
"So it is hoping critically because you are still determined to pursue that goal of stopping the housing development while fully cognisant that central government and local government processes are going to present very real obstacles to achieving that."
The activist groups were explicitly asked how hopeful they were of achieving their goals. And in the example of Thursdays in Black, which works to reduce sexual violence, they talked about one step forward, two steps back.
"So not everyone was hopeful of achieving their vision, they identified the obstacles in their way, but still carried on, saw it as important enough."
Anger helped motivate that.
Dewy, one of the Auckland Gen Zero crew talked about balancing hope and anger, "and I think that anger is mainly pushed by the reality".
He had entered the fray out of a sense of idealism, but stayed in it because of the desperate urgency.
As well as identifying these bright, fierce fires of hope, the book also explodes a few myths about the supposed political apathy of the millennial/zoomer generation.
"These groups are primarily volunteers, doing an enormous amount of work in their own time," Prof Nairn says.
"Yes, it is a particular group of young people but I don’t think they are necessarily unusual. So we challenged that idea of political apathy. I think there is just disillusionment with parliamentary politics, not politics per se. Also, it challenges that idea of young people being the ‘me’ generation. I think our participants generally challenge that. They are really thinking about not only themselves but actually the legacy that we leave future generations, they are thinking about the here and now and trying to create, in their groups, the world that they want to see. Some of the groups are really working hard on behalf, not only of themselves, but a wider group."
So, part of this work is to create, within the activist communities themselves, the world they want to see — whether that is a decolonised world, a world free of sexual violence, or an environment where people have the freedom to express their gender and sexual identities without fear.
In the text book, this is called prefigurative behaviour.
"So, for example, InsideOut ... how they operate as a group is modelling the world that they want to see in terms of acceptance of diverse sexual and gender identities. Protect Ihumatao, the way that they conducted themselves was actually modelling the goal, their political goals, the way they lived on the whenua, operated as a group," Prof Nairn says.
Another part of the picture identified by the research is the way in which these activist groups share each other’s concerns and work together.
For example, ActionStation and JustSpeak collaborated on a short video project, A Message from 2040, about JustSpeak’s goal of closing Aotearoa’s last prison by that date.
There were connections being made between two, three or more of the issues: colonisation and climate change and incarceration.
"They saw all these issues as overlapping," Prof Nairn says. "The academic term is intersectional — that these issues do not exist in silos. So, they had a really good analysis of all the interconnections; that colonisation and climate change go together. And part of what we have inherited in terms of climate change has been the result of colonisation and extractive industries and capitalism."
Interestingly, the country’s recent experience of the Covid-19 response was widely viewed as cause for hope.
"Covid offered a sign that fundamental, radical or major change was possible," Prof Nairn says, though qualifying that their research wound up before the fissures began to appear in support for the Government’s actions.
As another of the InsideOUT Kōaro activists said, "... literally with Covid, like this has proven that in a heartbeat we can completely change the ways that we are living ... so I’m hoping that there are a lot of lessons learned from this horrible thing that’s happening".
On the flip side, none of this is to glibly suggest that the kids are all right.
"They don’t feel that way, actually," Prof Nairn says.
For example, eco-anxiety is very real for them. Indeed, Prof Nairn’s not keen on the term.
"Because that makes it sound like it is an issue of anxiety, whereas I think it is totally understandable that you would feel anxious."
Younger and younger children will want to talk about that, she says, and to see the adults in their lives taking action; adults, city leaders and governments making a difference.
Too much is being laid at the feet of the young, too much responsibility.
"I think there is a lot of symbolising the future by talking about young people as our future."
We need to question that, she says. It’s not fair.
On climate change and all these other issues, the responsibility to act needs to be multi-generational.
There appear to be clear benefits in doing so, many of those interviewed saying that the very act of getting involved on an issue made them feel more hopeful.
As a couple of the Thursdays in Black activists told the researchers:
"You have to stand up for what you believe in life, don’t you?
"It’s important to care about things, it’s what makes us human."
The activists
Tabby Besley. Photo: Supplied
Tabby Besley: InsideOut Kōaro
Tabby founded the Queer Straight Alliance Network in 2012, running the organisation from her bedroom on precarious funding, with the aim of having a QSA or rainbow diversity group in every secondary school in the country. The organisation changed its name to InsideOUT Kōaro in 2015.
"I’m always saying to people how lucky I feel that we’re a ‘for youth, by youth’ organisation. And that we actually do put young people in leadership roles, and do give them the chance to do the stuff."
Pania Newton. Photo: supplied
Pania Newton: Protect Ihumātao
Pania was one of the group of cousins who first decided to challenge the Ihumātao housing development, planned for land confiscated when British troops invaded the Waikato in the 1860s.
She told the researchers she thought it should be young people doing the heavy lifting in the campaign.
"Our elders shouldn’t have to; many of them have already done the fight before us. They’re here to guide us, and it’s the young people who have the energy, the motivation and the physicality to do it."
The groups
• ActionStation
Is a people-powered online petition platform addressing diverse social and economic justice issues.
• Generation Zero
Is working towards a zero-carbon future to address the threat of climate change.
• InsideOUT Kōaro
Is promoting rainbow youth visibility and safety in schools and communities.
• JustSpeak
Aims to reduce and ultimately eliminate incarceration.
• Protect Ihumātao
Is fighting the impact of colonisation by reclaiming indigenous land confiscated in 1863.
• Thursdays in Black
Is working towards a zero-carbon future to address the threat of climate change.
