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.