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.