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.