Short abstract

What does it mean to be a “good” Arctic scientist in times of climate change? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from one of the most productive research stations on the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, I explore how “good” scientific practices form under the shadow of the climate crisis.

Long abstract

Environmental science is relied upon to produce representations of environmental futures to inform global climate targets. I explore how, as the relationship between environmental predictions and governance proves far from linear and scientists develop relationships to the places they study, environmental scientists question and find meaning in their work.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from one of the most productive research stations on climate change impacts in the Arctic, the Abisko Scientific Research Station in northernmost Sweden, I ask: What are understandings of what it means to be a “good Arctic scientist” in times of climate change?

Through participant observation during field campaigns alongside interviews, I show how “good” scientific practices change under the shadow of the climate crisis. The scientists revealed these dimensions of their practices by sharing moments of moral ambivalence, feelings of responsibility to Abisko as a place and the Sámi communities whose land they work on, opinions on structural failures in academia and climate governance, challenges they have navigating and communicating uncertainty, and the reasons they continue or fail to be motivated by the project of environmental science. Fundamentally, the omnipresence of climate change in the work of Arctic scientists raises ethical questions, which scientists must orient themselves around, ultimately shaping their practices.

By foregrounding scientists’ doubts, ethical deliberations, and efforts to make their work meaningful, this paper repositions environmental science not as a placeless, detached project of understanding and predicting Arctic worlds but as a deeply human practice embedded in environmentally and socially dynamic Arctic worlds.

Short abstract

How do climate scientists’ emotions influence their public engagement? Based on interviews, this contribution explores their perceived responsibility in framing climate emotions (e.g. hope), context-specific roles, and tensions between personal feelings, perceived responsibilities, and authenticity.

Long abstract

How do emotions about climate change shape how we navigate changing climates and how we envision liveable futures? While recognizing pluriform knowledge sources, my research focuses on climate scientists’ perspectives, exploring the emotions they experience and how these influence their public engagement. While studies (e.g., Clayton, 2018) have examined scientists’ emotions, I aim to connect these to their societal role: do they feel responsible for shaping an emotional framework for addressing the climate crisis?

Literature suggests that hope is an effective emotional framework in climate engagement (Ojala, 2012; Geiger et al., 2023), but scientists’ views on hope’s effectiveness remain underexplored, as does whether perceived responsibilities differ from one audience to another. Also underexplored is how scientists navigate tensions between their personal emotions and their perceived role in framing the crisis. Building on the reflections on climate scientists’ emotional labour by Head & Herada (2017), I investigate the balance between scientists’ perceived responsibilities in public engagement, their own emotional experiences, and the desire to remain authentic.

I am currently conducting semi-structured interviews with 20–30 climate researchers to address these questions. I hope to contribute to the discourse on how new ways of dealing with the climate crisis emerge from the interaction between climate scientists and their environment, specifically for these scientists. The research will also provide insights into the changing relationship between climate scientists and their social context, which I hope will contribute to the debate on what feelings about climate and planetary futures require from STS as a field.

Short abstract

If navigating changing climates affects our everyday lives, what are these “affects”, made–and capable–of? This paper offers a reconceptualization of ecoanxiety and climate feelings as practices of knowing, sensing, and caring for liveable futures on the frontlines of planetary exhaustion.

Long abstract

Ecoanxiety, defined by the APA as chronic fear of ecological doom, is experienced by over 50% of youth across countries – epitomising a growing concern with the interplay between the climate emergency and the global crisis in mental health. This intersection poses fundamental questions about how climate change affects our everyday social, private, and psychic lives, and how these "affects" become, in turn, catalysts of knowledge, action, and care for habitable futures (Cox 2024, Bargués et al. 2024, Masco et al. 2025). Through an interdisciplinary account of these questions, this paper charts the cultural histories of eco-anxiety, and its expression in climate psychology, youth climate activism, and climate-change science and communication, which are conceptualized in this paper as three key frontlines of planetary exhaustion. Drawing on discourse analysis and interviews, I propose to reimagine both terms––“eco” and “anxiety”––by thinking through and outside their respective “environmental climate” and “mental health diagnostic” framings. Instead, I propose a novel conceptual framework for understating climate anxiety and feelings as collective, albeit unequal, registers of what it means, feels, and takes to navigate multiple adverse climates (scientific, professional, political) that evoke moral injury and ontological vulnerability, all the while making conditions and horizons of possibility concrete.

Short abstract

This paper explores emotions in small-scale fisheries under climate change, conceiving climate perception as an embodied practice and (dis)concern(s) as fishers’ affective configurations. Challenges for climate communication and science–fishing collaboration from a STS-grounded perspective are given

Long abstract

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 75 interviews with the small-scale fishers of the Balearic Islands at the intersection of anthropology and fisheries science, this paper explores affects and emotional responses in fishing practices amid climate change. Inspired by material‑semiotics (Law, 2019) and the affective turn (Clough & Halley, 2007), we propose to understand climate perception not as an individual, primarily cognitive and visual process, but as a collective and embodied practice (Bourdieu, 1991; Selgas, 1999), in which the environment is neither external nor passive (Ingold, 2000). From this position, affects and emotions do not arise from the magnitude of environmental change itself, but from fishers’ relations with the environment in their everyday practices and in combination with governance constraints : Temperatures, species dynamics, regulations, and forms of trust in the sea, compose an ambivalent mechanics of (dis)concern(s), following a notion of distributed agency (Latour, 2005) and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988). Finally, we examine the relationship between representations of climate change and the experience at the Mediterranean Sea, showing how occasional mismatches between them generate critical barriers for climate communication, where emotions (Sasser, 2024), such as trust (Hardwig, 1991), shape possibilities for collaboration between science and fishing communities. This approach articulates alliances as a matter of concern (Latour, 2004) to collectively navigate the effects posed by climate change from which to envision planetary futures at the crossroads of science and society (Miller, 2001).

Keywords: climate perception, small‑scale fishers, emotions, science and society, affects.

Short abstract

The paper argues for cultivating sensory capacities as forms of resistance and resilience to the anaesthetizing—overwhelming and numbing—effects of the Anthropocene, proposing an aesthetic research practice enacted through participatory protocols that cultivate eco-emotionality and eco-sociality.

Long abstract

This paper presents a project that contributes to emerging interdisciplinary research on eco-emotions by examining how they are embedded in the specific environments where they occur. Developing an innovative methodology that combines multimodal Science and Technology Studies (STS) with artistic research, it investigates how emotional responses emerge through participants’ direct, multisensory engagement with sites of environmental disruption. Drawing on the original Greek meaning of aisthetikos—the capacity to perceive through the senses—the paper argues for cultivating sensory capacities as an active form of resistance and resilience to the anaesthetizing—overwhelming and numbing—effects of the Anthropocene. To this end, it proposes an aesthetic practice enacted through participatory protocols that cultivate eco-emotionality and eco-sociality as intentional sensibilities and critical tools for responding to ecological disruption and loss. These include protocols for documenting how ecological disruption is sensed, registered, or escapes registration through embodied perception; protocols for technosensing that extend the human sensorium through environmental sensors; protocols for expanded practices of collaborative sensing that foster forms of collective ecological attunement; and protocols for common-sensing ecological crisis through perceiving, interpreting, and responding to ecological disruption in materially grounded and socially meaningful ways.

Short abstract

There is a need to engage with feelings to foster socio-ecological transformations towards liveable futures. The presentation discusses concepts and methods to engage with ecological feelings in research and teaching to counter structures of indifference towards ecological decline.

Long abstract

An increasing number of scholars highlight the role of emotions in socio-ecological transformations, pointing to feelings such as hope, anxiety or shame as potential motivators—or barriers—for climate action. A growing body of literature also identifies ignorance and indifference as affective dispositions that contribute to inaction. Yet academic institutions often continue to privilege ideals of rational knowledge production that exclude feelings and embodied experiences from conference spaces and classrooms, thereby reproducing structures of indifference.

In this presentation, I argue for the need to engage with ecological feelings in both research and teaching in order to foster socio-ecological transformations towards liveable futures. Drawing on the work of Blanche Verlie (2021), I first suggest that responding to climate change requires learning how to 'live with' it and to emotionally attune to its realities. I then propose that developing 'critical emotional awareness' (Ojala, 2022) within academic 'spaces of support and kindness' (Ploder, 2022) can offer one way of fostering such engagement in research and teaching. As a concrete method, I introduce a collaborative autoethnographic writing practice that invites participants to engage with their own ecological feelings and to collectively explore ways of feeling, responding to and shaping socio-ecological transformation. By discussing concepts and methods that cultivate an engagement with ecological feelings, the presentation aims for a research and teaching culture of unlearning indifference towards today's planetary changes.

Short abstract

Drawing on situational analysis, this paper examines afforestation as an affective infrastructure through which climate feelings, care, and engagement are co-produced across human and more-than-human relations, shaping the fragile conditions under which liveable planetary futures remain thinkable.

Long abstract

How do people remain capable of caring, acting, and imagining futures while inhabiting a world shaped by overlapping and persistent crises? This paper takes this question as a point of entry to examine how climate feelings are not only experienced but actively produced within everyday climate practices and what this production asks of STS.

Drawing on ethnographic research on a German–Icelandic afforestation initiative, the paper advances a central empirical finding: participants experience afforestation as a sanctuary; a fragile yet vital space of refuge, grounding, and shared vulnerability that enables continued engagement with the climate crisis. Far from being escapist or apolitical, this sanctuary emerges through practices of care and mutual protection among human and more-than-human actors, mediated by planting activities, photographs, e-mail correspondence, climate data, and moments of pause.

Conceptually, the paper brings feminist STS and ecofeminist political ecology into dialogue to theorize sanctuary as an affective infrastructure: a relational arrangement that regulates climate feelings and sustains engagement. While STS has long emphasized the co-production of climate knowledge, governance, and publics, climate emotions often remain analytically treated as secondary effects or individualized responses. This paper argues instead that climate feelings must be understood as infrastructural and situational achievements that require active maintenance.

Methodologically, the paper draws on situational analysis and ethnographic vignettes to trace how sanctuary is momentarily achieved, carefully maintained, and occasionally threatened across human and more-than-human relations. This approach foregrounds the methodological stakes of studying climate feelings as relational and infrastructural phenomena rather than individual states.

Short abstract

We examine climate-health risks from the 2025 California and 2024 Bolivian wildfires through a Real-World Knowledge (RWK) approach. Integrating experiential, practitioner, and scientific knowledge, we show how Planetary Health is both socially embedded and politically constituted.

Long abstract

In 2023, the World Health Organization declared the climate crisis and associated extreme weather events a public health emergency. Heatwaves, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires increasingly compromise health, wellbeing, and livelihoods, triggering cascading climate-health risks ranging from increased mortality to the emergence of infectious and non-communicable diseases and disrupted living conditions. Yet, despite growing recognition of their urgency, progress towards climate and health goals remains insufficient. The strikingly limited implementation of these goals points to a gap that extends beyond biomedical or environmental explanations. Drawing on two recent catastrophic wildfire events – the 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires in California and the 2024 Bolivian wildfires – we propose a Real-World Knowledge (RWK) approach that connects to STS debates on epistemic pluralism and the co-production of knowledge. By integrating experiential, practitioner, and scientific knowledge, we examine how wildfire risks are produced, interpreted, and governed across unequal socio-political contexts. This allows us to show how Planetary Health risks are not merely governed politically but are politically constituted. Structural, infrastructural, policy-related, and practice-related factors actively shape climate-health risks and outcomes. Failure to address climate change, land-use regimes, infrastructural vulnerability, policy regimes, and community needs reproduces preventable health harms during extreme weather events. Against this backdrop, we argue that Planetary Health must become a more socially anchored and publicly engaged field – one that confronts its political determinants to unlock its potential in theory and in practice.

Short abstract

Entrepreneurial climate anxiety — the entanglement of ecological concern, self-preservation, and declining trust in collective politics — drives tech-literate actors toward climate solutionism. How might this detract from collective action and whose anxiety gets to shape the future?

Long abstract

As faith in institutional climate governance falters, a diffuse but distinctive group has emerged: tech-literate entrepreneurs developing blockchain and AI-based responses to climate change — from tokenised conservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon to community resilience initiatives in rural Europe. Drawing on research conducted with interlocutors across this ecosystem as well as the last five UN climate change conferences, this paper examines the affective configuration that animates the entrepreneurial drive for, and various forms of, tech solutionism: an entanglement of ecological concern, anticipatory self-preservation, and declining trust in collective politics that generates a powerful drive to act unilaterally.

I argue that this entrepreneurial climate anxiety is a productive force that channels climate feeling into market-making, technical solutionism and futurework, in ways that may make collective political engagement less likely. It concentrates the capacity to imagine and enact futures among those with the capital and technical literacy to do so. Furthermore, it can generate a demand on communities recruited as project beneficiaries to perform an idealised version of a synergistic relationship between nature and humans which can sit in tension with those communities' own aspirations for development and self-determination. The paper asks what this constellation reveals about whose anxiety gets to shape the future.

Short abstract

Beyond the knowledge deficit model, this study examines flood risk in Italy as an affective experience. Using mixed methods, it highlights how climate emotions trigger immediate protection while potentially constraining long-term adaptation. Risk communication is a relational, world-making practice.

Long abstract

Extreme flood events are increasingly experienced as moments in which climate change becomes affectively and materially present in everyday life. Across Europe, recurrent flooding has produced not only casualties and damage, but also fear, uncertainty, anger and fatigue, reshaping how citizens relate to institutions, expertise and futures. This paper examines flood risk communication and preparedness in Italy as a domain in which climate knowledge, emotions and practices are co-produced in uneven and contested ways.

Drawing on a mixed-methods study conducted within the project Risk Communication and Engagement for Societal Resilience, the paper combines a nationally representative survey (n = 2,500) with a deliberative public consultation involving 100 citizens. Rather than treating risk perception as a scientific deficit, the analysis attends to how flood risk is lived and felt through memories of past events, anticipatory anxieties, trust and distrust in warning infrastructures, and ambivalent expectations towards public authorities.

Trought a public consultation, we engage STS debates on environmental thinking, climate feelings and situated forms of knowing. The paper explores how perception and attitude to flooding both enable and constrain preparedness and collective action. It shows how emotions can simultaneously mobilise protective practices and foreclose imaginaries of long-term adaptation. In this sense, flood risk communication emerges as an affective, relational and world-making practice, central to how liveable futures are imagined and inhabited on a planet increasingly shaped by climate extremes.

Short abstract

This contribution focuses on the contradictory affects that develop in care work amidst planetary biocide. It aims to complement feminist STS accounts with a Berlantian theory of affects to capture the tensions of reproducing life within a life-harming world.

Long abstract

Against imaginaries of technoscientific environmental salvation, feminist STS scholars have directed our attention to the ethico-epistemological importance of the mundane work of care that sustains and reproduces human and more-than-human worlds (Puige de la Bellacasa, 2017). This contribution explores another dimension of care work in times of environmental catastrophe: its contradictory affects. Learning from interviews and ethnographic research with French households who engage in 'everyday environmentalism', this paper sits with the contradictory feelings and the feelings of contradictions that saturate the 'green' version of what materialist feminists have called reproductive labour, the labour that reproduces life. Instead of focusing on the environmental catastrophe as an effect of our material lives, it reads it as an affective signal within those lives. The environmental polycastrophe heightens a tension of capitalist systems of production and confronts us daily and materially to the contradiction of reproductive labour amidst global biocide: that the very labour we employ to reproduce our lives also harms them. Putting in dialogue the affect theory of Lauren Berlant with feminist STS ethics of care, this contribution argues that by heightening the sense(s) of the contradictions of capitalism in our daily care, the environmental catastrophe produces affects that help us register what Berlant calls the 'ordinariness of crisis' (2011) and a sense of 'feeling historical' (2005), meaning 'being forced into thought about it' (ibid.: 5), necessary for prefigurative politics.

Short abstract

Through works of speculative fiction and an STS lens, Monarch butterflies reveal: an entanglement of agencies; the threat (and necessity) of loss; and the complexities of community. They can keep us attuned to the real challenges of our collective existence, but also to the possibilities of change.

Long abstract

The climate crisis is partly one of scale, where humans confront the immensity of change, the specificity of impacts, and the seeming impossibilities of effective individual action (Cohen 2026). How might we grapple with this scale and loss? What opportunities might emerge toward a more collaborative future? We take the monarch butterfly as a space of intersection between our everyday lives and their more global impacts (especially in North America). STS offers an opportunity to create a nuanced understanding of these entities and their roles as not just icons, but as beings with agency - keeping alive the necessity of knowing otherness within the world, even while acknowledging the ways that humans establish conditions of possibility. Through works of speculative fiction and concrete personal interactions, monarch butterflies (as real beings and symbols of climate vulnerability/resilience) can be positioned as revealing:

an entanglement of agencies (where monarchs react to and resist human attempts to shape their existence);

the threat (and necessity) of loss (where monarchs die individually and potentially die off, and where humans must confront their own desire to fully control this process);

and the possibilities of community (where we nonreductively include nonhumans in the “ongoing crafting of lives in common”).

They can keep us attuned to the real challenges of our collective existence, but also to the possibilities of change (Johnston 2019). The complexities of these realities, explored through an STS lens, can promote a meaningful, nuanced understanding of the past, present, and potential futures of this interspecies worldbuilding.

Short abstract

The Common Body is a conceptual and methodological tool, an epistemological practice interested in challenging the established paradigm of the immune system as a battlefield, a battle against enemies, and of the body as a (human) discrete entity, encapsulated by the limits of the skin.

Long abstract

The Common Body is a research project that examines scientific evidence on the composition and the role of the microbiota, allowing the claim for a new immunological paradigm to address ecological and health challenges.

Modern immunological science conceives the bodies as threatened by the invasion of foreigners. The motivation of invaders is always destruction, and therefore it is necessary to destroy them first. The ideological role of this imaginary is to make violent destruction as part of daily life, naturalizing violence as an immutable part of reality (Martin, 1990).

In microbiome research, the human organism is presented as composed of multiple ecosystems, a multitude, suggesting that thanatopolitical attempts to eliminate other microbials are giving way to an affirmative microbiopolitics based on generative multispecies relationality

These propositions open a new perspective on the assertion that a body is “an intricate and coordinated multitude” (Van Dooren et al., 2016).

The microbiopolitics of the human microbiome challenges the Pasteurian immune model in which the self is sustained on and defends itself against another non-self microbial (Ironstone, 2019).

Scientific evidence on the importance of the microbiota for human health claimed that the more diverse the ecosystem, the more diverse the "inner forest".

Based on ethnographic research, the proposition intend to ecologize the body, a fundamental category for anthropology, radicalizing the idea of the planet as a body, extrapolating the value of the body as an analytical category to other more-than-human entities, including the atmosphere, ecosystems, microbiota and other living beings.

Short abstract

By images of climate crises, the triple planetary crises can be described; yet graphs, maps, seemingly any visual notes contain inherent problems of representation and imagination. This contribution advocates for the search of anticipatory, situated and ethically grounded images of climate crises.

Long abstract

Satellite technology and AI calculation capabilities resemble media epistemologies that, make the triple planetary crises accessible, measurable and understandable. By mere endless production of climatological knowledge, and especially images of climate crises, they limit the development of alternative futures as they contribute to present climate feelings by following past epistemic realizations.

As satellite images prove changes of natural country borders caused by progressively melting ice, and states react with concepts of “moving borders” (Travers 2024), hallucinations of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) create simulations of physical non-plausible satellite images anticipating urban flooding (Climate Portal 2024). With this, one can face central topics of images of climate crises: the problem of adequate translation of scientific knowledges in technological produced images, and further, the problem of imagination following the representation of climate crises effects and phenomena (Schneider 2018). Moreover, the production of climatological images comes with climate impact too: rockets launches for satellite installments release man-made greenhouse gas into the middle and upper stratosphere (Zisk 2024), material capabilities for AI tools are connected to environmental consequences caused by energy consumption and emissions.

These ambivalent remarks on the production as well as on the interpretation of images of climate cirses call for the search of their alternatives. Be it in alternative mapping in human geography (Khanna 2021), prompting of biodiversity (Colombo, De Gaetano, & Niederer 2023) or the aesthetic potential of earth observation (Eyres 2017), emerging fields take new, re-combining and alternative approaches according to prevalent frameworks of (Western) scientific and technological progression.

Short abstract

This study investigates the emotional challenges teachers face in addressing climate change, focusing on how their professional roles and interactions with students, parents, and the school system influence their experiences of eco-anxiety.

Long abstract

This study investigates the emotional challenges teachers face in addressing climate change, focusing on how their professional roles and interactions with students, parents, and the school system influence their experiences of eco-anxiety. Using Panu Pihkala’s (2022) “Process Model” and Marja Ojala’s (2022) “Critical Emotional Awareness (CEA)” framework, the research examines the causes of teachers’ eco-anxiety and the strategies they use to cope. The findings show that teachers feel eco-anxiety not only when students express concern about climate change but also when students appear indifferent, creating a significant emotional burden. Younger teachers, especially those in their 20s, report higher levels of hopelessness, while older teachers with more experience tend to express greater hopefulness and concern. Parental influence and limited institutional support further complicate the issue, leaving teachers feeling constrained in their efforts to promote sustainable behaviours and lacking opportunities to share their concerns with colleagues. Teachers suggest practical solutions, such as sustainability audits, targeted training, and access to mental health resources faster than what the current system provides to address these challenges. The study highlights the need for comprehensive support systems that combine action-oriented coping, emotional regulation, and systemic changes to help teachers manage eco-anxiety effectively. Future research should explore the long-term effects of eco-anxiety on teachers’ well-being, evaluate the impact of specific interventions, and examine how institutional policies can create more supportive environments for educators.