Short Abstract

This panel invites contributions that address ecological distress, how it is experienced and theorised in context of climate and other related crises. We are also interested in exploring the political potential of ecological affects, and how they might be transformative or status-quoist.

Long Abstract

Ecological distress can be conceived as an affective condition shared amongst humans, other-than-humans and even wider ecologies and landscapes. It moves those afflicted by it - both humans and other-than-humans - to live elsewhere, or to stay in spite of grim futures. As a pervasive affective condition, it has come to influence a range of scholarly debates. In anthropology, debates addressing ecological affects like grief, anxiety, trauma, or solastalgia have just begun (Wardell 2020). Anthropologists have investigated afflictions in terms of disability (Taylor 2024), restlessness (Crane 2025), tension (Simpson 2026), and multi-species mourning (Chao 2023). Others have also looked into the generative, reparative, and transformative potential of grief (Cunsolo 2017; van Dooren 2014).

In this panel we are interested in asking: how and with which affects do people experience and address human and other-than-human ecological distress? How is ecological distress articulated, distributed, and theorized? How does ecological distress articulate or exacerbate forms of distinction such as class, race, gender, caste, and others? How can we understand and conceptualize ecological distress as a relational experience shared across humans, other-than-humans, ecologies and landscapes? How does ecological distress become generative or transformative, and whose distress is being heard? Or, how might ecological distress become another tool for conservative politics?

Our panel, overall, welcomes theoretically grounded, ethnographically and/or methodologically rich contributions that discuss ecological distress and its manifestations, what it means to live in an ecologically distressed world, and how anthropologists might advance/complicate our understanding of the phenomenon.