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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how eco-grief unsettles dominant cultural narratives and creates space for renewed ways of thinking, feeling and relating. In doing so, it reframes ecological disorientation as a liminal state that disrupts inherited worldviews and creates space for ecological reimagining.

Paper long abstract

As ecological crises intensify, growing numbers report experiences of ecological grief: emotional responses to loss of more-than-human lives and environments. While eco-grief is frequently interpreted through conventional, human-centred mourning models focussed on individual experience, it is increasingly recognized as a collective emotional response to planetary collapse. Beyond its emotional impact, eco-grief might serve as a catalyst for reshaping cultural imagination.

This paper examines how eco-grief unsettles dominant cultural narratives and creates space for renewed ways of thinking, feeling, and relating ecologically and collectively. In doing so, it reframes ecological disorientation as a meaningful phenomenon: a liminal state that disrupts inherited worldviews and creates space for ecological reimagining.

Drawing on a comparative analysis of Heideggerian phenomenology and Ubuntu philosophy, the essay conceptualizes ecological grief not as a retreat into despair, but as an invitation to reorient ourselves within the more-than-human world, thereby “rewilding” the collective imagination and unlearning habits of control, separation, and linear progress characteristic of anthropocentric thinking. It subsequently examines how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of eco-grief, especially when expressed through art and ritual such as the case study of a glacier funeral, can help articulate new metaphors and affective grammars rooted in ecocentric notions such as affect, reciprocity, and care.

By drawing on culturally diverse perspectives, the paper explores how moments of spatial and existential rupture can catalyse deeper ecological awareness, reframing these affective and spatial disturbances as a foundation for fostering ecocentric values.