Presentation short abstract

How do we know emotion in political ecology? Using a scoping review of 105 articles and reflections from my own work, I explore how our epistemologies and methods make emotion visible, and highlight three key frictions for the field to grapple with.

Presentation long abstract

This paper grows directly out of a moment at the 2022 POLLEN Emotions symposium, when Andrea Nightingale asked a deceptively simple question that has stayed with me since: How do we know emotion in political ecology? This paper is my attempt to sit with that question and push the field forward.

Drawing on a scoping review of all publications that explicitly engage emotion and/or affect in political ecology (105 articles), I map how we seek to know emotion. I ask: What methodological and analytical practices make emotions visible? How are these linked to different onto-epistemological commitments? And what are the implications for knowledge, and for the ethics and politics of our work?

I show that we now have a sophisticated onto-epistemological vocabulary for understanding affect and emotion as co-produced across bodies, places and power relations. Yet I also trace three persistent frictions: an eliding of the distinction between affect and emotion; a stubborn methodological reliance on talk despite our claims that much emotion is non-verbal; and a relative silence around the ethics of producing and harnessing emotions in research and activism.

Interweaving review findings with reflexive vignettes from my own work, I sketch concrete ways we might move through these tensions, including sitting more deliberately with affect–emotion debates, deepening our use of non-verbal, sensory, arts-based and reflexive methods, and foregrounding the ethical stakes of our emotional labour. I invite conversation about what becomes possible when we place the question of how we know emotion at the centre of our practice.

Presentation short abstract

I explore the emotionality of human-wildlife interactions, through an ethnography of Gaddi pastoralists in India and interrogate the politics of emotions and ecology that centers a global north characterization of fear to justify top-down technocratic conservation management.

Presentation long abstract

The emotionality of human-wildlife interactions is assumed to be innate and universal within a majority of conservation literature and public discourse. In the context of human-carnivore interactions, especially in the global north, ‘fear’ is characterized as an inevitable negative emotion that can only be addressed through the removal of the source of fear and is often utilized to justify top-down technocratic solutions including the elimination of the entire carnivore species from the landscape. However, proponents of emotional geography build on the Foucauldian framework of capillary power and draw attention to ways in which the state or specific actors produce convenient narratives to evoke specific emotions in its subjects. Emotional geography thereby teaches us to carefully dissect rather than strive towards clean linear conceptualizations of emotions. Furthermore, anthropologists of emotions reveal ontological plurality in the conceptualizations of emotions across cultures, especially apparent in several animistic indigenous cosmologies. In this paper, I look to present an emic understanding of the role of emotions in the context of human-wildlife interactions, which is based on ethnographic research among the gaddi pastoralists of Himachal Pradesh, India. By doing so I look to explore the ways in which experiences of emotionality of human-wildlife interactions, transforms into narratives of emotionality. Through this paper, I look to illustrate the relevance of anthropological approaches to interrogate the politics of emotionality in human-wildlife interactions that have been dominated by understandings of fear from the global north.

Presentation short abstract

This article traces how emotions with multiple others fracture and spill over as negative surpluses that shape the Kibale National Park landscape in Uganda into a zone for ecolabel tea production but could in future be mobilised towards a more transformative conservation.

Presentation long abstract

Emotional political ecology has centred emotions as not only important for shaping subjectivities of conservation actors, but also vital pathways to transformative conservation. Recent literature in this field has foregrounded IPLCs and how they mobilise and deploy emotional connections with multiple others while performing conservation. Comparative narratives from culturally more fluid settings remain sparse in this discourse, however. Using Nixon’s notion of slow violence, I trace how emotional intensities incrementally shape the culturally dynamic Kibale National Park (KNP) landscape in Uganda into a zone for ecolabel tea production, and question whether annealing those emotional ruptures opens new possibilities for transformative conservation governance. I perform this exploration within the Kabarole District Forestry Office Archive, which simultaneously harbours expectation and conjured dreams, but also unanticipated forebodings of future failure. The analysis reveals interventions for formal forest management by the colonial and Toro native forestry administrations as imbued with emotional anxieties that fracture relationships among the landscape’s multiple others into gradational human-environment conflict and strained labour relations. When these anxieties accumulate and eventually spill over as negative emotional surpluses, the KNP landscape becomes a prime zone for ethical intervention through ecolabel tea production. What risks might such appropriation and commodification of emotions through ecolabelling present for the spiralling of the landscape’s emotional anxieties into further uncharted trajectories? I argue that conjuring transformative futures for landscapes like KNP could be more viable if conservation interventions took into account and attempted to anneal their negative emotional surpluses.

Presentation short abstract

This talk examines emotions as relational forces that shape human-elephant coexistence in Sagalla, Kenya. We show how emotions such as fear, shame and feelings of oppression reveal power dynamics, create fearscapes, and entrench existing vulnerabilities, offering insights for more just coexistence.

Presentation long abstract

Emotions are often approached in conservation as tools for influencing behaviour to improve coexistence outcomes, not as analytical lenses that reveal the everyday politics, power relations, and lived experiences that shape human-wildlife relations. Drawing on emotional political ecology and emotional geography, this paper examines how emotions operate as relational forces in everyday encounters between communities, conservation actors and elephants in Sagalla, Kenya.

We show how emotions act as connecting tissues linking people to each other, to elephants, and to their changing environment. Collective feelings of marginalisation become political tools used to demand accountability from conservation actors, articulate injustices, and negotiate coexistence on uneven terms. At the same time, emotions are fluid and entangled with ecological changes: intensifying droughts reshape how fear, anxiety, or care are felt and expressed, producing ambivalent outcomes that bind communities together while also entrenching social differentiation that disproportionately affect unmarried women and widows.

The paper also traces how emotions “stick” to bodies and places. Persistent fear transforms everyday environments into fearscapes, constraining mobility and producing forms of slow and emotional violence that undermine long-term conservation goals. By understanding trauma not as an individualised experience but as an embedded, collective and political condition, the analysis opens space for imagining healing-centred and just coexistence futures.

Overall, we find that emotions reveal coexistence as an ethical and political process, and human-wildlife conflicts as emotional conflicts shaped by power, vulnerability, and whose experiences are recognised. Centring emotions offers crucial insights for building more just and transformative conservation practices.

Presentation short abstract

Research from a culturally-embed UK upland explores farming communities emotions during policy driven land use change. Lack of agency and loss of people-place relationships are compounding fear and mistrust. Understanding lived experiences supports environmental justice in conservation practice.

Presentation long abstract

Landscape restoration can evoke strong emotional reactions from impacted communities when connections to place are perceived or actively threatened by land use change. For example, land use change in UK uplands is highly contested, in-part a result of culturally embedded farming communities as well as historical legacies of landownership and power imbalance. Research from one of the UK’s largest nature recovery partnerships, Cumbria Connect, is exploring the links between our emotional connection to place and our attitudes towards nature restoration, exploring this pathway through lens of values, identity and power. Shifts in UK agri-environment policy to focus on public good outcomes has resulted in trends of landowners returning farm tenancies in-house to deliver nature recovery. Feelings of fear and mistrust are exacerbated by the collective traumatic experience of loss of these farming communities. Farmers and rural communities hold multi-generational connections to the land underpinning their sense of self and livelihoods. Furthermore, we report a lack of recognitional justice in which emotions can be dismissed by practitioners with limited meaningfully incorporation of dimensions of lived experiences in local decision-making. In this talk we bring together research exploring farmers relational values towards land, landscape and community, as well as a photo elicitation study of resident’s sense of place, to understand perspectives of positive and negative land use changes. We discuss ways to utilise these strong place-based and emotionally centred relationships between people and the land to enrich and re-define this connection within nature, climate and public good outcomes for enabling transformative change.

Presentation short abstract

By using sensory and multimodal ethnography, I explore how the human-plant encounters are perceived and positioned in environment, and to critically reflect on relationality, connection to environment, and emotions to rethink form being and presence in urban setting.

Presentation long abstract

By rooting in the circulation, accumulation, and reformation of how emotions and affects, this paper explores the entanglement of humans and plants in London’s public green spaces. By focusing on how these relationships between humans and plants and the "nature" are positioned and understood within the larger environment, I conceptualise the public green spaces not merely as a backdrop for human activity, but as a dynamic space of accumulation and circulation of emotions, entangling humans' own presences altogether with other beings within the same space. Here, the "environment" acts as a medium that holds emotions, mediating a sense of being that is deeply intertwined with non-human agencies.

Through sensory and multimodal ethnography, I investigate how the human-plant relationship is understood through its placement within this environmental texture, and discuss how the interactions and relations are embedded within flows of affect that gather in London's public parks and gardens. By engaging feminist and decolonial political ecologies of relationality, the paper situates these encounters within broader critiques of urban temporalities structured by accerationism, productivity, and extraction. I highlight that centring the ambient forms of emotions, offers insight into how relational thinking and practices, repositioning everyday experience as multispecies co-becoming. Through attending to these emotive flows, the paper highlights how emotions can open alternative ethical orientations and balancing, more reciprocal futures for living-with urban environments.

Presentation short abstract

EVERY TREE gathers postcard stories about trees, showing relational values of joy, serenity, and grief. It maps how emotions shape human-tree relations, revealing inequalities in access, safety, belonging. It argues emotional political ecology strengthens urban forestry beyond 'nature as therapy'.

Presentation long abstract

Urban greening is often justified through simplified wellbeing narratives that focus on 'the self' (trees reduce stress; nature heals). Using Every Tree Tells a Story (EVERY TREE), a participatory citizen science project in Glasgow based on using artist-designed postcards, this study takes emotions seriously as political: they draw attention to, and organise attachments, to place; shape claims-making; and illuminate social-spatial inequalities.

We analyse, curate and present postcard narratives and drawings from an emotional political ecology perspective, attending to how participants describe joy, calm, wonder, fear, anger, and grief in relation to specific trees and treescapes. Rather than treating emotions as individual mental states, we read them as relational and situated: tied to life-course events, family memories, migration, loss, more-than-human perspectives, and everyday practices of care. We also track how emotions cluster around socio-spatial conditions, access to safe greenspace, housing precarity, street maintenance regimes, and experiences of exclusion.

Methodologically, EVERY TREE reflects on the possibilities of arts-based citizen science (inviting vulnerability, capturing non-instrumental values, enabling intergenerational participation, engendering imaginaries of place) and what it can obscure (silences, self-selection, translation into policy categories). We argue that centring emotion can shift urban forestry from “trees for wellbeing” toward “trees for just and caring futures”, where governance is accountable to lived feelings and the more-than-human relations they express.

Presentation short abstract

This talk explores how emotion shapes urban conservation in Nairobi’s greenspaces. Drawing on my PhD research, it reveals how care, grief and resistance in places like Nairobi National Park, Karura and City Park Forests expose deeper struggles over belonging, justice and the future of urban nature.

Presentation long abstract

Urban greenspaces are often imagined as spaces of renewal, healing, and ecological balance. Yet in cities like Nairobi, they are also charged emotional terrains — places where histories of exclusion, loss, and longing are inscribed in the soil, trees, and fences that demarcate belonging. Drawing on my doctoral research on the socio-political reconstruction of urban protected areas, this presentation explores how emotion and memory mediate everyday encounters with conservation and environmental governance in Nairobi.

Through ethnographic and visual inquiry, I trace how local residents, vendors, and stewards articulate affective relationships to urban nature—ranging from pride and nostalgia to grief and alienation. These emotional geographies illuminate the deep contradictions of Nairobi’s “green renaissance,” where urban nature reserves/ protected areas such as Nairobi National Park, Karura Forest and City Park Forest are celebrated as symbols of progress while reproducing social boundaries inherited from colonial land regimes and contemporary elite urbanism.

By centering emotion as both method and matter of inquiry, this paper argues that feelings of displacement, care, and resistance are vital to understanding the lived politics of conservation. I suggest that attending to these affective dimensions enables more grounded, humane, and decolonial visions of urban ecological futures—where justice is not only institutional but also emotional, embodied, and relational.

This work also informs my short documentary, Green Shadows of Injustice, which translates these affective ecologies into visual storytelling as a form of research, mourning, and repair.

Presentation short abstract

In Catalonia, climate change is embodied through physical and mental distress or solastalgia. Emotions are central in people's everyday lived experiences of climate change. These experiences vary based on social positions, including gender, place of residence, economic situation, and age.

Presentation long abstract

Climate change is an everyday, lived experience rather than a distant threat. This article centres emotions and embodiment to examine how climate change permeates daily life in Catalonia, Spain. Climate Relief Maps used to gather, analyze, and visualize accounts of lived experience from an emotional and intersectional approach—with focus group discussions. These methods surface the emotional geographies of climate change’s impacts, delving into how bodies and everyday places are altered.

Findings reveal four main pathways through which climate change becomes embodied: (1) physical and mental distress, including heat-related strain, anxiety, and fatigue; (2) loss of sense of place as landscapes, seasons, and memories feel unsettled; (3) reconfigured social and community spaces and practices, as social life and leisure is reconfigured; and (4) dilemmas between governance and individual agency, as people question their own everyday capacity and responsibility and that of the institutions and macro-level actors.

An intersectional lens shows how these embodied experiences vary by gender, age, health, and residence, among other axes of inequalities. Emotions are not e but active forces shaping coping, adaptation, and claims on institutions. Recognising emotional and embodied impacts clarifies who bears which burdens, how attachments to place are reworked, and what forms of response feel possible or legitimate.

By foregrounding lived experience in a Global North context, the study offers a grounded account of climate realities that often remain invisible to policy. It calls for just policies that account for embodied realities and emotions as central.

Presentation short abstract

The paper examines what shepherdesses and women livestock managers in the Pyrenees say (discourse), feel (intimate experience), and do (practice) when facing climate change. It adopts an emotional political ecology approach to highlight the subjective and embodied processes that shape vulnerability.

Presentation long abstract

Situated within the current of feminist political ecology and emotional political ecology, this work reveals the subjective, embodied, and emotional processes underlying the concept of vulnerability. The empirical study, realised through life histories, explores the multiple and differential perceptions of factors of pressures as well as the underlying causes of intersectional sensitivity and capacity of adaptation of shepherdesses and women livestock managers in the Pyrenees. Moreover, the focus on various subjectivities reflects an epistemological stance that conceives the body and emotions as the very first place affected by socio-environmental transformations. Given the urgency imposed by today’s crises, the analysis must be relocated to bodies and emotions rather than treated as a study detached from everyday experience. The presentation of the bodily and emotional dimensions explored during the study will be organized into three parts: the intimate dimension, the collective dimension (in relation to social categories), and the relational dimension (in relation to animals, the environment, landscapes, etc.). Acknowledging these realities is nevertheless essential when considering possible avenues for adaptation, particularly in a sector such as pastoralism, where the engagement of human and non-human bodies and the relationship to space are fundamental features of the activity.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines ecological grief as a method in political ecology, showing how emotions shape community responses to environmental harm and how affective memory fosters collective repair and territorial defence in post-war El Salvador.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores ecological grief as a political ecological method, examining how emotions shape community engagements with contaminated rivers, deforested hillsides, and drought-stricken fields in postwar El Salvador. Working alongside survivor organizations and intergenerational memory groups, I analyze how affective expressions—grief, anger, pride, fear, and hope—structure environmental meaning-making and guide practices of territorial defense.

Narratives of wartime displacement resurface through accounts of water scarcity, mining residues, and erratic climatic cycles, revealing an affective archive where ecological and political traumas intersect and continue to shape collective interpretations of environmental harm. Ecological grief catalyzes diverse forms of collective repair. Youth photography initiatives, community radio programming, commemorative rituals, and participatory mapping practices become tools through which residents mourn ecological loss while mobilizing resistance against renewed extractive pressures. These affective practices do more than express loss: they create spaces for intergenerational dialogue, restore relations with wounded landscapes, and generate new forms of environmental responsibility grounded in long histories of survival, care, and solidarity. I argue that centering emotions illuminates how political ecologies of memory can foster shared responsibility, strengthen community resilience, and inspire transformative ecological futures. Attending to affect exposes the entanglement of ecological degradation with structural violence, while also highlighting the creative strategies through which communities reclaim agency and articulate alternative visions for their territories. By foregrounding affect as an analytical and methodological lens, this paper shows how ecological grief becomes a generative force for imagining just and sustainable futures in regions marked by overlapping histories of violence, environmental degradation, and climate disruption.

Presentation short abstract

This research examines intersectional and gendered experiences of urban water stress in Jaipur, India, through an emotional and embodied lens. It demonstrates how women’s emotions influence coping strategies under water scarcity, challenging technocratic governance through a justice lens.

Presentation long abstract

This research offers a critical analysis of mainstream narratives on water scarcity and adaptation in climate change discourse, highlighting the intersectional and gendered experiences of water stress in urban India. Adopting an intersectional feminist approach, this research keeps an emotional and embodied approach at the centre of analysis. Year-long data collection in 2023-24 using qualitative methods was conducted in Jaipur, northwest India, a city facing extremely high groundwater stress (Hofste et al., 2019). The research focuses on an understudied city in India since most urban academic research based in the country focuses on mega-cities, overlooking the situation faced by ‘ordinary cities’ (Zérah & Denis, 2017).

By centering on the body and emotions in the analysis of water infrastructure and response to water stress, the presentation argues that emotions influence the daily negotiations and coping strategies that women employ in response to water stress. Embodied emotional experiences, such as anger, frustration, hopelessness, and stress, shape the everyday lives of the residents and how water infrastructures are accessed, used, and controlled in the context of manufactured scarcity (Sultana, 2011). However, the emotional response and strategies are uneven. This differential access underscores the need to critically examine who can adjust and how much versus who cannot.

Emotional geographies challenge technocratic approaches to water governance by highlighting the need for empathetic, justice-oriented policies, without which there is a risk of deepening inequalities, overlooking the everyday struggles faced by women in informal settlements.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores Irish Traveller emotional life, drawing on Ahmed, Anzaldúa, and the Black radical tradition. Emotions circulate between bodies, land, and state power, shaping resistance, commoning, and solidarities, revealing affect as a site of hope, care, and anti-capitalist transformation

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the emotional landscapes of Irish Traveller life and struggles over land, commoning, and autonomy, showing how affect shapes both marginalisation and resistance. Emotions circulate between bodies, spaces, and institutions, producing belonging or exclusion and mediating encounters with state power, policing, and capitalist accumulation. Fear, anger, pity, and joy are not private feelings but relational forces that structure everyday life and influence who is recognised as part of a community, whose futures are constrained, and whose practices of land stewardship are delegitimised.

I draw on the work of Sara Ahmed on affective circulation, Gloria Anzaldúa on embodied and borderland experience, and scholarship within the Black radical tradition to analyse how emotions inform political strategies, ethical research relationships, and collective care. Emotional registers employed by the state and media often construct Travellers as outsiders, mobilising affect to justify enclosure, eviction, and the commodification of land. In response, participants cultivate embodied and collective forms of anger, love, and joy that sustain social ties, commoning practices, and hopeful futures.

By centring emotions, this paper demonstrates the analytic and political value of affect for understanding land-based struggles, connecting Irish Traveller experiences to broader conversations on Indigenous land rights, anti-capitalist resistance, and alternative futures. Emotions emerge as both tools and sites of transformation, revealing how communities resist oppression, reimagine shared relationships to land, and forge emancipatory political ecologies that challenge capitalist degradation and produce more liveable, relational futures.

Presentation short abstract

We show how emotions shape decisions and interpretations throughout the entire research process. Using a self-reflexive analysis of intersectional positionalities, we explore how personal, professional and global events shaped our doctoral development and political ecology research in East Africa.

Presentation long abstract

Self-reflexivity is increasingly common in development and political ecology studies and attention to the role of emotions in research is growing. Yet, reflexive work on emotions often focuses mainly on the data-collection phase, usually tied to long-term, place-based fieldwork. Our paper departs from the conviction that researcher emotions influence actions, decisions and interpretations across the entire research process – from choosing where and what to study, to decisions about methods, theory and analysis. Acknowledging and reflecting on emotions throughout, we argue, can inform findings, enrich our disciplines and support researcher wellbeing. Grounded in a self-reflexive analysis of intersectional positionality, we – two white, European, queer women – reflect on how emotions linked to personal, professional and global events became entangled with our methodological pathways during our doctoral research in rural development in Uganda and Rwanda. We show how related emotional experiences, grounded in particular identities, translated into different methodological choices and research experiences due to our distinct positions and relations in university and field settings. Life and world events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, meeting a new partner and becoming a parent evoked complex, sometimes contradictory emotions that significantly shaped our methodological processes. By tracing this emotional journey, we demonstrate the subjective and messy nature of (postgraduate) development and political ecology research. We encourage political ecologists to attend closely to emotional and subjective experiences throughout the entire research. In doing so, we seek to promote greater transparency in methodological accounts and inspire to ‘alternative’ methodologies that challenge unrealistic scientific norms.

Presentation short abstract

Our research explores the role and politics of care in rural lives and landscapes in Nepal, as well as in our research practices. In this session we reflect on the relationships and insights that emerge between these, to contribute methodologically and conceptually to emotional political ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

Our research explores the role and politics of care in rural lives and landscapes in Nepal, as well as in our research practices. In this session we reflect on the relationships and insights that emerge between these, to contribute methodologically and conceptually to emotional political ecologies. Grounded in feminist and emotional political ecologies, in ethics of care scholarship, and in critical work by participatory geographers, we explore ‘moments that matter’ in which emotions are centred, paid attention to, and learnt from. We will share such ‘moments that matter’ from our research in Nepal, including those that feature the gifting of beans, the preparing of vegetables, village shopping sprees, being with our own families and being invited into others, reminiscing and remembering, and care by our colleagues. Engaging with the relationality of emotions in our research allows us to consider their role both in rural lives and landscapes, and in research practices. We argue that centring emotions and a politics of care can help political ecologists to contribute to more just rural futures, and to more caring research that stands against extractive and colonial knowledge practices.

Presentation short abstract

We present an intimate conversation about our journeys as engaged environmental justice researchers and lesson learned in the process of trying to decolonize ourselves from our colonial gaze in the production of knowledge.

Presentation long abstract

We present an intimate conversation about our journeys as engaged environmental justice researchers and lesson learned in the process of trying to decolonize ourselves from our colonial gaze in the production of knowledge. Our work focuses on designing and applying transformative research agendas to co-produce knowledge with people affected by environmental conflicts and disasters in Latin America. The aim of this exercise is to reflect about the need for, and challenges of, decolonizing the self in our attempt to develop horizontal, reciprocal, and equitable relations with those we co-produce knowledge with. We look within and dive into our own research trajectories to identify how our practice has changed overtime and shaped how we do environmental justice research today. This is also a call for other researchers to reflect about, and to care for, their body-territories in their engaged environmental justice praxis.

Presentation short abstract

In this paper we present a collective process aimed at engaging with researchers’ emotions and affects to reflect on practices that are at the crossroads of political ecology and participatory action research. This allows reflecting on the transformative nature of our research activities.

Presentation long abstract

This is the story of a research collective engaged in an STS and Political Ecology inspired reflexive process to shed light on instances of participatory action research in which some of us are involved and that ambition to support just water transformations in France, Senegal, Tunisia, and Cambodia. As a collective, we felt experimenting with creative ways of doing research could lay the ground for a genuine analysis of how research – whether political ecology or participatory action research - is intertwined with just transformations, beyond self-fulfilling grand statement of intents. We drew sensory maps of the sociohydrological territories in which we work, self-described our research stances through collages, and designed a card game in collaboration with a visual artist. We also experimented with ways to explore research stances and practices through bodies in the form of image-theatre, play-back theatre, and forum-theatre. Exploring emotions and affects proved conducive for exploring the multiple dilemmas each and every one of us grappled with daily yet seldom expressed in academic writing, e.g. the development of working collaborations with marginalized and dominant groups; or the impetus emotions provide and their suppression in the name of scientific legitimacy... Our experience shows that such exploration is tantamount to riding a wave of discomfort: it is about voicing the contradictions inherent to our position of researchers in the Global North, about making oneself vulnerable, and about expressing doubt – most importantly it hinges on establishing a climate of trust and benevolence that is akin to careful research.

Presentation short abstract

Situated within feminist political ecology and arts-based research, this research attends to the place of emotion in marine governance through a case study of an environmental campaign resisting a decision made by the Irish government to grant a mechanical kelp harvesting licence in Bantry Bay.

Presentation long abstract

While marine governance has emerged to manage the global interest stimulated by the ‘oceanic turn,’ it largely hinges on techno-rational approaches that do not account for the human dimensions of the oceans. Focusing on the case study of an environmental campaign resisting a decision made by the Irish government to grant a mechanical kelp harvesting licence in Bantry Bay, my doctoral research attended to these human dimensions with the aim of better understanding the place of emotion in marine governance. Situated within feminist political ecology and arts-based research, this research employed policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, and autoethnographic snorkelling to collect data. Using the Listening Guide methodology to analyse data, the study revealed listening as a key tool for researching emotion, shedding light on the deeply emotional nature of resource conflicts, the centrality of emotion in ‘connecting with each other’ and ‘connecting with the ocean,’ and the importance of reflexively listening to our own voice as researchers. These findings led to an art-science collaboration that works with and through emotion to think about how to listen for emotion as a collective. Ultimately, by consolidating existing work on oceans, emotions, and governance, and making significant methodological and empirical contributions to these fields, this research serves as a springboard for future work that aims to respond to the question of, ‘Whose emotions come to matter in marine governance?’

Presentation short abstract

This article explores the potential role of emotions and art-based approaches to overcome increasingly polarized societies by fostering mutual empathy and generating transformative power. It draws on a 3-year participatory research project exploring just land-use transitions in the Pyrénées.

Presentation long abstract

It is increasingly recognized that for ecological transitions to take place, they must be socially just, and therefore co-constructed by those affected, so as to take into account their justice claims. This is obviously not a simple matter. While political ecologists have highlighted the need to address deeply rooted power asymmetries, the question of how to deal with an increasingly polarized world remains unsufficiently addressed. There are indeed strong divisions opposing actors with conflicting justice claims, stifling the needed collaborative efforts towards just transitions. This article explores the potential role of emotions and art-based approaches to overcome such divides by fostering mutual empathy and generating transformative power, i.e. countering oppressive power. This work draws on a 3-year participatory action-research project conducted in the Pyrénées mountains, in a valley marked by strong oppositions between traditional livestock farmers and neo-rural organic farmers. Through art-based methodologies such as creative writing, the project created a safe space for them to confront their visions, share emotions and deeply held values, and collectively explore just transformations of their valley. This process was followed by a film maker, who turned it into a documentary of great sensitivity, which resonates beyond the valley, prolonging and expanding mutual empathy and collective empowerment. This article analyses the oppressive and transformative power dynamics at work in this process, and deciphers the mechanisms through which emotions played a role to overcome polarizations, foster mutual empathy and generate transformative power. The article also questions the researcher’s position and emotions in such processes.

Presentation short abstract

The talk contrasts the technoscience of seedbanking with the commemoration of agrobiocultural diversity in an art project as different affectively charged responses to agrobiodiversity loss. They evoke different forms of hope for futurity, which in turn inform different practices of future-making.

Presentation long abstract

In light of the tremendous loss and destruction of biodiversity in the Anthropo*cene, seedbanks have become promissory carriers of socio-ecological hope for futurity. An iconic example is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), an international seed storage facility in the Arctic acting as the world’s stronghold against crop diversity loss. In this talk, I discuss what it means to rethink agrobiodiversity loss as a global challenge that not only requires technical solutions but also evokes affective responses worth attending to. I do so through an art project curated in response to the SGSV and its bio-centric approach to agrobiodiversity conservation. The Agri/Cultures.Seed-Links project (Svalbard, 2019) was a one-day exhibition of agrobiocultural diversity from all around the world that was subsequently buried in the permafrost alongside the SGSV, as a biocultural addendum to its seed collection. Conceiving the art project as a performance of commemorating agrobiocultural diversity and mourning its loss, I unfold a critical perspective on both the what and the how of seedbanking as the hegemonic international response to agrobiodiversity loss. Whereas the SGSV evokes a techno-salvationist hope for ongoingness that disregards and even perpetuates the naturalcultural relations underlying agrobiodiversity loss, the art project prefigures a mournful hope for burying destructive forms of life and cultivating less destructive worlds that arises from attending to how forms of life are entangled in forms of loss. I show that centring on the affective dimensions of different responses to socio-ecological transformation and loss allows for a more nuanced understanding of future-making practices.

Presentation short abstract

Through radio, we can pre-figure how to co-create a 'light' infrastructure that is human-to-human, that can connect and access the emotional core of our movements. Radish Radio invites you to help us imagine how to leverage this medium, to inspire empathy, connection, hope, and courage.

Presentation long abstract

Emotions are energy in motion.

In a world where billionaires exist; a world of AI overreach and surveillance capitalism, online communications infrastructure has become a machine to manufacture rage and consent, to secure the future of capital accumulation. Billionaire-resourced far-right influencers, podcasters, and rage-bait content generators, stir up fear and rage, steering whole populations further right.

Individuals in these spaces feel disempowered and ineffective, relegated to passive roles - consumers and witnesses. As genocide, climate collapse, and apocalyptic futures unfold on our screens, we feel hopeless, powerless, and isolated. This collective emotional state locks us in a self-fulfilling doom spiral of passivity and despair.

We need a communications infrastructure that is human-to-human, where people can engage, create, imagine, and build. Radio is a trusted space for dialogue and praxis, on our own terms, without the filter of algorithms, or corporate ads, or data harvesting. Through radio, we can pre-figure how to organise for a "light infrastructure" that is human-to-human, in the hands of people, and in the interests of people, not capital accumulation.

Radish Radio invites friends to join us in imagining the radio of tomorrow. What if it were owned by you and for you? What if it were a place of radical hope, empathy, courage, and creativity? Radio combines the intimacy of long-form audio with music, and its ability to access our emotional core and stir us. What if, through accessing our emotions in this way, we could also build the structure that keeps us safe and connected?

Presentation short abstract

This presentation interweaves philosophy, critical theory, and speculative fiction to offer a hopeful reimagining of symbiotic futures with AI. It investigates how a practice of kinship and affection towards biological species and machines enables transformative pathways for ecological flourishing.

Presentation long abstract

Technosymbiosis is a worldview that advocates for the harmonious co-evolution of humans and nonhuman species with AI. This presentation interweaves philosophy and critical theory of AI with speculative fiction to offer a hopeful reimagining of technosymbiotic futures. It investigates how a practice of kinship towards the nonhuman realms (of both biological species and machines) enables potentially transformative pathways for ecological flourishing. By seeking a world of nurture and care with these powerful nonhuman lifeforms, the possibilities of human existence can be transformed, and new forms of connection, preservation, and symbiosis made possible. The presentation will draw from feminist and Afrofuturist speculative fiction, which centres emotional relations between human and nonhuman life. It will use these images as an entry point to re-imagine the possibility of mutualistic human-AI-ecology relations.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how fear structures anticipatory knowledge within climate governance. It shows how emotional infrastructures of anticipation transform uncertainty into control, reproducing the present and constraining the plural futures political ecology strives to imagine.

Presentation long abstract

This paper tells a story from within the emotional infrastructures of global climate governance. Drawing on political ecology, Science and Technology Studies, and ethnographic research in and around International Organizations (the World Bank, UNDP, Global Environmental Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Green Climate Fund), it examines how fear of risk, uncertainty, and reputational loss has become a central affect organizing environmental knowledge-making.

International Organizations increasingly seek to govern the future through anticipatory knowledge, notably via Social and Environmental Safeguards (SES). While presented as tools for justice and prevention, these safeguards operate as assemblages of anticipatory knowledge: complex networks of experts, documents, norms, and affects that render uncertain futures governable. Yet, rather than enabling transformation, they generate anticipatory inertia. The fear of harm, failure, or conflict sustains procedural control, codifies compliance, and narrows epistemic space for Indigenous and alternative knowledges.

By bringing political ecology into dialogue with emotional and anticipatory governance, this paper argues that climate governance is not only technocratic but affectively driven. Fear stabilizes bureaucratic order, while care and moral responsibility are mobilized to justify control. Revealing these affective dynamics helps us understand why transformative change stalls—and how reclaiming emotional reflexivity could reopen pathways toward more plural and abundant futures.