The affective disruption of climate fatalism in education

This conceptual paper examines climate fatalism as an affective condition that shapes how teachers and students perceive agency and possibility in the face of the climate crisis. While often framed as a cognitive stance of resignation or passivity, recent scholarship highlights that fatalism also circulates affectively, structuring moods of futility that erode the capacity to act. Drawing on affect theory, I conceptualise climate fatalism as an affective orientation and infrastructure that simultaneously routinises paralysis and, at times, unsettles dominant pedagogical scripts of hope, resilience, and solutionism. Rather than approaching students’ expressions of futility as obstacles to be overcome with optimism or motivational techniques, I argue that educators can engage climate fatalism as a disruptive affective force that opens space for systemic critique and collective imagining. The paper concludes by suggesting some pedagogies that might work through climate fatalism, transforming its affective energies into possibilities for solidarity, justice, and alternative futures.