Paper short abstract:

Starting from empirical explorations made among Swiss activists concerned with ecological issues before and after the COP21 meeting, we shall concentrate on discourses and practices referring to spiritual change, including ecofeminism, and offer a frame of interpretation in terms of queer ecology.

Paper long abstract:

Discourses and practices mobilized around the globe by activists for ecological concerns, currently put a strong emphasis on the neccessity of a radical change of humanity. The radical change that is ambitioned is supposed to come along with fundamental transformations at both a collective and structural and at a personal level. Interestingly, in this view about change spirituality seems to emerge as a mediating factor. In this panel we wish to present some empirical explorations that we have made in Switzerland in the months preceding and following the COP21 meeting in Paris. We shall problematize aspects of an ongoing research on the role of spiritual activists in current mobilisations in favor of energy transition in Switzerland. Some of them having an ecofeminist imprint, we shall offer a reflection on the way to understand them with regard to the queer ecology approach. We shall first describe the main dimensions, questions, problematiques and fields of the ongoing research. Secondly we develop the key aspects of ecofeminism and the queer ecology approach and in the conclusion, we question the pertinence of this concept and its impact on the actual transition process to a more ecological way of life.