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Short abstract:

Articulating and navigating the ambivalence of hope and loss are key to fostering resilience and creating lively futures. This talk explores relevance practices in social scientific research about oceans and forests, and tentatively asks if these shape scholarly discussions about hope and loss.

Long abstract:

Articulating and navigating the ambivalence of hope and loss are key to critically examining socio-environmental destruction whilst fostering resilience and creating lively futures. Our talk explores how historical conditions shape relevance practices in social scientific research about oceans and forests; and tentatively asks how the same conditions might impact scholarly discussions about hope and loss.

Contemporary science policies give momentum to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, prompting scientists to engage with diverse disciplines and societal actors. Drawing on conference observations, interviews and document analysis, we compare how research is oriented to diverse actors’ matters in two interdisciplinary social scientific fields: marine social sciences (MSS) and forest policy research (FPR), which explore how people use, value and relate to maritime worlds and forests, respectively. MSS scholars study interactions and power differentials between diverse maritime actors, and actively debate whose matters MSS scholarship should orient to. In contrast, FPR scholars primarily orient their research to forest managers and forest policy makers and leave such orientations largely implicit. We argue that fields’ socio-historical developmental trajectories account for these differences, such as the fields’ relative autonomy and dominant scholarly approaches which shape reflexivity.

Building on these findings, we tentatively reflect on whether fields’ socio-historical developmental trajectories might also shape mobilisations of hope and loss. Discussions about these emotions permeated the last MSS conference - thematised around navigating ‘blue fear’ and anxieties in the Anthropocene - but seem less prevalent in FPR.