Activating academia...

Encouraging anyone to attend an event that explicitly involves facing difficult realities is a challenge. This is especially true when the intended audience feels time-poor, overstretched, disengaged, or perhaps thinks they already know enough. It can help to:

• Schedule your screening to replace, rather than add to, the activities your audience is expected to engage with. For example, you could propose hosting a PEB as part of a departmental seminar series or as a conference session rather than as a stand-alone event. 
• Lean into personal invitations rather than relying on mass communications. In my experience it can be surprisingly effective to invite somebody directly,  and more so if you are able to convey why you would value them being there and what you think they would gain from it 
• Seek endorsement by trusted figures (e.g. senior leadership).  If you have good relationships with influential people in your host institutions, see if they will help by encouraging/inviting others to attend.  

If despite your best efforts, your event ends up preaching to the choir, that’s still something you can work with - a key call to action is that everybody in the room brings the briefing out of that echo chamber and into other groups they are part of.  For example, you could encourage students to show it at their next society meeting, researchers in place of a lab meeting or journal club, leadership figures at a board meeting, administrators at the next departmental ‘away day’ etc.

Frustratingly, those with the most institutional power and responsibility are often the hardest to reach! The ideas above about extending personal invitations and scheduling your screening as part of a session they’d usually attend can help. You might also consider inviting senior figures to play a specific role in your event, as this can increase their chances of attending in person.  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend inviting less-engaged leadership figures onto a panel (see below) but giving a short welcoming address, for example, could be appropriate and may in itself encourage others to join. 

We are often much more comfortable intellectualising information about difficult subjects than we are with acknowledging the emotions they provoke and reckoning with what it means for our lives, work and choices going forward. The People’s Emergency Briefing’s facilitation guide suggests a scalable discussion format that focuses more on the former - you may want to follow this template or adapt it using some of the prompts outlined above. If you do this I would recommend you:

• Explicitly frame the session as about our personal and/or institutional response to the key issues raised by the film, and not as a critique of the film, its material or its speakers.
• Acknowledge the unfamiliarity and potential discomfort involved in doing so in this setting. 
• Steer away from letting a single issue dominate the conversation (even if it's an important one!). Acknowledge the validity of concerns that are raised, signpost spaces to discuss those subjects in more detail, and bring the focus back to the key, constructive discussion points.
• Call on the support of skilled chairs/facilitators who, if needed, can help with all of the above

When we know how truly deadly a predicament we are in, how deeply unjustly this manifests and how this demands transformation on a scale never seen before, it can be alarming and frustrating to come across communications that convey to us anything less.  I regularly feel this acutely: even when I’m running my own workshops I worry that - knowing the power of cognitive biases, defence mechanisms and societal norms - participants might leave thinking something along the lines of “things look pretty dire,  but if we all get solar panels we’ll be OK” (even thought I absolutely have not suggested this!). But I also know that we cannot expect one single session to take people on what was for me a years’ long pathway from feeling concerned, to understanding the bigger picture, to questioning and unlearning the societal messages I’d been brought up with and had bought into, to having the agency and community to act in response.  The PEB film is a tool that I have seen shift otherwise-comfortable people out of their complacency, and it's generating momentum and engagement that’s been desperately lacking amidst all the challenges to climate communication recently.  For activists this is something we can use and build upon. 

So, on this basis I suggest handling challenges from more-engaged audiences as follows:

• Acknowledge the limitations of the film as a 50 minute snapshot of how climate impacts are manifesting in the UK and the public’s response to them. It’s not the full picture, nor a roadmap to ‘fixing’ things. 
• Frame the film as a starting point for deeper engagement and as a platform for discussions about what effective, holistic action in your communities looks like. Whilst urgent transformations are imperative, rushing from information to action without reckoning with the spectrum of emotional responses the former can bring up might not be strategic. I recommend the Climate Psychology Alliance’s guidance on this.
• Signpost resources for deeper learning, community and action. Some suggested resources for academic audiences are listed above, and via my Resources page. You could also take inspiration from groups like those in Camden and York who have compiled follow-up resources directing participants to a range of local groups and events, including more ‘activist’ ones. 
• Consider putting an activist on the panel (if you have one) who can speak to the broader context of the Emergency and the spectrum of different actions needed, ideally in an empowering and compassionate way that will engage your audience (see below). If you decide to do this, I’d advise meeting with them in advance to discuss and make sure you align enough on the above.

My best advice would be to choose panellists who can model moving from knowing to acting in different ways. You might want to consider students, staff and/or alumni of different ages, backgrounds or career stages who the audience will relate to.  I would avoid platforming an institutional figurehead who is likely to feel they have to defend the status quo. I would recommend pre-meetings with the hosts and careful planning of your discussion to be really clear about what the panel is for and what ‘traps’ you all want to avoid (e.g. debating the nuances, excessive focus on incremental individualised change etc).

Thinking back to 2018 when I first realised just how serious the Climate & Ecological Emergency was, I left that seminar room feeling utter despair, and feeling very alone in that despair. I was only able to channel that emotion into action once I had become part of a supportive community where the danger we are in is openly acknowledged. As such I think that signposting or planning follow-up opportunities after your session - including spaces that allow participants to express difficult feelings and connect with others - can be especially valuable.  

This is of course more work for organisers and it’s important to recognise our own limits for how much responsibility we can each take on for others’ emotions. The best balance lies probably in doing what we can to make the experience of facing difficult realities a kinder, more empowering one for others, whilst taking care to avoid exhausting our own capacity to keep doing this work.