Environment, Justice, and the Politics of Emotion: A Symposium
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.