Environment, Justice, and the Politics of Emotion: A Virtual and In-Person Symposium.
University of California, Riverside, April 27-28, 2023. Organized by Dr. Jade Sasser, Dr. Blanche Verlie, & Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray
The Environment, Justice, and the Politics of Emotion symposium happened on April 27 and 28, 2023. Video recordings of the online sessions can be found here. We thank everyone who participated for making this a really inspiring, thoughtful, and invigorating event.
About:
As climate and ecological crises mount, so too are intense experiences of environmental emotions including eco-anxiety, fear, grief, guilt, skepticism, anger, and trauma, as well as less discussed affective experiences such as pleasure, joy, amusement, wonder, optimism, ambivalence, apathy, and embarrassment. In a society primed to frame uncomfortable emotions as individual failures, default responses to some of these emotions are to dismiss and deny, or to seek individualized, psychological therapies.
This symposium seeks to bring these conversations out of the domain of the personal and private, as they both reflect and shape the very public and political arenas of climate change and social justice. We are also interested in engaging the very real, intersectionally-differentiated, mental health effects of climate impacts and ecological destruction at local, national, and global scales.
While the explosion of attention to ecological emotions is remaking the landscape of climate politics, the growing attention to them typically ignores matters of inequality, particularly the ways race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, language, and class intersect to produce and amplify privilege, vulnerability, fear, and an even wider range of emotions not often discussed in the mainstream.
There is a pressing need to situate eco-emotions as political and cultural phenomena. This will require the theories, methodologies, tools and insights of a diverse set of academics, practitioners, and activists. Thanks to a long history of intersectional feminist, Indigenous, anti-racist, and anti-colonial scholars and activists, we know that emotions, affects, and feelings are politically generated and can be politically generative. This symposium seeks to stage a conversation among wide range of disciplines, on the interplay between these three topics: environment, emotion/mental health/affect, and justice, broadly conceived. We encourage those working on these topics in diverse fields and sectors to submit proposals.
At this symposium, we hope to explore critical questions such as:
Why do environmental emotions matter, or not? What is the role of emotion in environmental policy, environmental justice, or climate/environmental movements? What are the political implications of environmental emotions?
Who feels ‘eco-anxiety’ and other ecological emotions, to what extent, in what ways, and how do we know? Who is centered in current research and activist approaches, and who is excluded?
How might we integrate environmental and climate emotions and mental health into climate justice research and activism?
Do terms such as solastalgia, eco-anxiety, and climate grief adequately capture non-dominant experiences of emotions emerging from the entangled oppressions of people, place and planet?
How might analyses informed by intersectional perspectives in emerging from the global south , queer, and/or disabled communities shed light on discussions of climate emotions and mental health?
How do eco-emotions inform collective and political action (as it has done with the global youth climate movement) or violence (as with “green hate” or ecofascism)?
How does whiteness shape the cultural work of climate emotions? How can we de-center it?
What other kinds of emotions have received less attention in the dominant research, and what are the implications of ignoring this wider range? How can we move analyses of joy, hope, motivation, optimism, passion, and determination further into the discussion of climate emotions?
What other aspects of everyday life, such as reproductive plans, are shaped by environmental and climate emotions? How do these impacts manifest, and for whom?
How do political ideologies and structures, such as heteronormativity, colonization, and racial capitalism, influence how people engage affectively with climate change?
Keynote speakers:
Dr. Nicole Seymour: “Climate Crisis and Comedy Crisis”
Dr. Nicole Seymour researches the roles that queer styles and affects play in environmental movements. She is the author of Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013), Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), and Glitter (Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, 2022). She recently held fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Graduate Advisor for Environmental Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Dr. Charles Ogunbode: “I feel, I resist, I resign: what emotions tell us about individual responses to present and future climate change in Nigeria and the Philippines'“
Dr. Ogunbode is an Assistant Professor in Applied Psychology at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research broadly addresses how our personal experiences, the media we consume, and the attitudes of people around us shape the way we respond to environmental issues. He is also interested in how engaging with nature and the environment affects our wellbeing.
Questions?
Get in touch with us at cj.pol.emo@gmail.com