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.