Emotional Political Ecology in Ruptured and Uncertain Worlds
Although emotions are a central facet of lived experience, they have been under-explored in the processes of dispossession, power and capital intensification that political ecologists study. Papers in this panel will specifically explore how emotions figure in ever-intensifying experiences of nature-society disruption in the Anthropocene.
Scroll to the bottom of the page for the recording of the live session for this panel held Friday 9th September.
The emotional life of rupture at Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 Dam
Sango Mahanty, Australian National University; and Sopheak Chann, Royal University of Phnom Penh
Embracing uncertainty in political ecology through emotions and affect
Noémi Gonda, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; and Andrea J. Nightingale, University of Oslo
Affective labour and climate action: A conversation across disciplines
Anna Sturman and Blanche Verlie, University of Sydney
A recording of the live session for this panel below:
Comments 20
I thought I’d share some questions/reflections a panelist, starting with Noemi’s and Andrea’s great paper on embracing uncertainty in political ecology through emotions and affect. From your examples and from Andrea’s summary at the end, I think you showed us how affective relationships (human/non-human, including with data) gain importance in contexts of uncertainty. In terms of finding solutions – I was hearing an argument to work more closely on engaging and supporting affective relationships more than the specific effects or the ‘what’ of uncertainty. Andrea noted methodological challenges and it would be great to discuss these further.
I also really enjoyed Blanche and Anna’s discussion (can I call it a debate?) about the meaning of emotional labour, whether the conjunction of ’emotions’ and ‘labour’ is useful – or are we in fact just talking about labour? Linking labour to social reproduction I thought raised some interesting insights on the unrecognised work of managing anxiety and disintegration around climate change/nature-society rupture. A question for Anna: are there insights for historical materialism from the affective turn? e.g. is it highlighting new or different forms of labour or production?
Looking forward to our discussions in the plenary!
Hi Sango, thanks for this! I agree, if we are advocating for attending to affective relations and how they can build coalitions, then we need much more careful work on how those affects arise and change over time and space. I am also slightly wary of our own argument because in some of my earlier work on subjectivity and climate change, I had reviewers asking me to map out how we could promote the kind of subjectivities ‘we want’. Personally, I find such normative endeavours, especially when we are talking about complex, political and deeply personal dynamics such as affect and subjectivities, to be terrifying. Far more potential for harm than good. It relates to Alice’s comment below about the use of uncertainty to exert state control and oppression. Thanks for great comments.
Wonderful presentations, panelists!
Sango and Sopheak:
I loved your presentation. The photo elicitation exercise seemed like a really powerful way to encourage the expression of emotions and narratives around these. I wondered if you could tell us a bit more about how this worked as a group – did you encourage group discussion about the photos and their implications? Were some photos chosen by many people, and did you notice that people had different emotional relationships with the phtotos? Your brief mention of the woman who chose the rapid photo and the silence that fell across the group made me think about maybe the value of affect (as well as the conscious emotions you focused on). I know we talked the other day about how the affect/emotion distinction and debate can be a rabbit hole, but I do wonder if the framing of emotions as consciously articulated sense may not capture these potentialities that flow between people?
Thanks Alice for your comments!
Here’s a bit more on the photo method: everyone chose from the same pool of photos – although there were some similarly themed images, everyone selected from the set at the same time (there were around 120 to choose from). So no, people could not choose the same photo. I remember considering this at the time – and whether it might have been good to have repeats of images to enable this. Something to ponder for next time! Discussion about the photos was an important focus of the activity, and this brought out some very heartfelt reflections on the images people selected, what the image represented for them and what drew them to it. Interesting question on whether some kinds of images were more commonly selected: looking back I think watery and forest images and images representing religious symbols or festivals recurred a lot in the activity, and a link was often made to lost places and community connections.
I agree with you that affect figured in this activity, especially in terms of broken connections to places and people. Your comment made me think further about the affect-emotions distinction and how so often in scholarly work people centre one or the other (as we did ). Maybe we need to be more willing to engage both dimensions simultaneously where the context calls for it. I’d love to talk more on this – and I’d love to know Andrea’s thoughts too!
Anna and Blanche:
I really enjoyed listening to your conversation/ debate. One question for both of you – how has your debate between each other (and I realise this zoom was part of an ongoing discussion) shifted your perspectives?
I wonder what is at stake in retaining the Hochschild understanding of emotional labour just within the paid work environment. It seems to me that now the concept creep is such that it emotional labour is the term used to refer to keeping other people happy and managing one’s emotions also in unpaid work. While this has different political implications, perhaps there are also advantages of bringing together paid and reproductive labour conceptually like this? (Or am I just an old school ‘wages for housework’ feminist?)
Thanks so much Alice! I am definitely a ‘wages for housework’ feminist too. But I’m not a labour theorist, and my conversations with Anna have helped me think more about what is at stake when using the term ‘labour’ or ‘work’, and when different contexts might raise (or lower) the stakes in different ways. I am still not sure what I think about when and where it is appropriate to use the term though; I think I’m more of a fan of expanding the use of the term to new situations, because I think it helps us understand the new or different ways people’s energy is being exploited or drained by capitalism. But perhaps this waters down the term such that it no longer has traction in e.g. industrial relations negotiations; so I’m not sure.
For Noemi and Andrea: Thanks so much for your presentation. I love your idea of recentring uncertainty as a potential opening for transformational practices – uncertainty not as something we should fear but as something that we should embrace.
I have been thinking about uncertainty as something that can be produced as well as something inherent to our predictions of the future. For example, looking at how the production of uncertainty in the land sector in Cambodia is deployed as a tool of governance – gray and ambiguous legal directives, unwritten rules, enable state power and the disciplining of populations as people do not know when/for what reason state repression will emerge, and encourages a patronage-based authoritarian state structure.
Not sure how relevant this is for your discussion, but I did wonder listening to your presentation about the potential for powerful actors to use uncertainty to push particular agendas and stoke fear-based governance (such as the risk of authoritarianism Andy Stirling has written about), and how, instead, to move from efforts to control to something we should embrace.
Hi Alice, great comment. I am also really interested in uncertainty, both politically but also has something that is a core characteristic of life. It seems so incongruous that modern societies focus so strongly on planning and prediction. But I agree that in our work this is something that Noemi and I need to develop further. I guess it strikes at the heart of a conceptual tension I grapple with: the political mobilisation of uncertainty and in that sometimes the artificial production of uncertainty which is especially acute in capitalist markets. Here I am thinking of the uncertainty around energy prices in Europe which is generating massive profits for some and poverty, anxiety and misery for others. On the other side of this tension is ontological uncertainty. That the world itself (and the dynamics we seek to study) are inherently uncertain. To keep going with my energy example, there are inherent uncertainties in long term supply, technological robustness, etc which in some sense underpin, but in other ways are exploited by those who seek to use uncertainty for political economic gain. The work of Veronica Jacome at Temple University on electricity systems provides a strong example. Her work shows how electricity grids had to be cast as continuous and reliable in order to be profitable. Increasingly low income communities are being locked into expensive electricity habits which are predicated upon continuous use. Electricity grids themselves are not in fact that easily amenable to continuous and reliable supply so there’s a technological and discursive rendering of the grid as stable in order to generate profit.
Hi Alice, I agree, in these times of burgeoning authoritarianism across the world, the manipulation of uncertainty and the discursive creation of false certainties is more important to have in mind than ever. The way uncertainty is usually engaged with privileges “expert” interventions and “scientific” knowledge claims over alternative, local, emotional and experiential knowledges. This type of pseudo-scientific responses to societal problems (climate change, the pandemic etc) call again and again for masculinist responses that are hand in glove with authoritarian leaders.
The manipulation of emotions is also a tool widely used by authoritarian populist leaders (e.g. racist discourses that fuel the fear of refugees and that justify the construction if fences at the country border in Hungary; discourses about how populations need to feel grateful to the authoritarian leader in Nicaragua thereby delegitimising all contestations etc).
Sango and Sopheak:
Thank you for this great presentation. I truly enjoyed it and it reminds me a lot about my research in Nicaragua: dams, extractive projects, plantations, political crisis, disasters and the effects of climate change at the basis of disrupted lives and livelihoods.
I was wondering about your research participants for the photo elicitation workshop and the interviews in general. Maybe I was biased by the pictures and your examples, but it seemed that you were mostly talking with women about emotions? And if not, how do you include men in these discussions? In my field research in Nicaragua, an eminently macho society, it has been more difficult to discuss emotions, embodied experiences of suffering with men than women or at least it took much more time and longer stays to get to that. If this is something that you observe also, how is this influencing our emotional ways of envisioning emancipation?
Still about methodology: you mention that you have been careful in the interpretation of emotions. Can you please share more about that? I find this very tricky and I am increasingly thinking that it is not so useful for us to “label” other people’s emotions: anger, sadness, sorrow, joy, etc… Rather, what we are interested in is how emotions can contribute to putting things in motion, to emancipation, to collective mobilisation…
The important question is what emotions can do instead of what emotions are? Right?
Hi Noemi, thank you for your excellent questions. The images and stories we shared in this presentation were from a women’s discussion – but we also held similar sessions with men and youth (mixed). In this activity, we weren’t asking about emotions, but rather inviting people to select images that reflected ‘what was happening in their lives right now’ – their selected images and reflections provided a window into their emotional experience. Given the recency of resettlement, their reflections were often about their experience of disruption and dislocation. Your reflections on Nicaragua are interesting – I’d love for Sopheak to comment on parallels and differences with masculinity in the Cambodian context (maybe in our panel if he doesn’t get to the forums).
On the interpretation of emotions: I was speaking at a practical level – we revisited and discussed our interviews, group discussions and observations with each other and with another team member, Soksophea, to reflect on our understanding of what was expressed – rather like what Josie and Mubina discussed in Panel 1.
I was interested in your reflection about the important thing being ‘what emotions do rather than what emotions are’ (referencing Sara Ahmed’s work). This was our original starting point too – we wanted to understand how emotions figured in resistance to the dam. Then, as we spent time at Lower Sesan 2, we were struck with how experiences of intense loss and disruption could also have an immobilising effect. Labelling emotions is perhaps not useful, as you say – in general our emotional language can be rather limited. But we found it important to account for this broader emotional experience of rupture, which had split communities and catalysed mobilisation as well as acquiescence – in equal parts. Perhaps Alice’s suggestion on affect provides a lead here?
Thank you for engaging with this work and I’d love to some of these issues further in our panel!
Thank you Sango for your response and for reminding us of the aleatory character of affect/ emotions: they can be catalysers or paralysers and sometimes both at the same time! Still, they have the potential to be openings for thinking about emancipation, as it has been highlighted in most of the presentations. Looking forward to the live discussion tomorrow!
Thank you everyone for the rich discussion. I have been thinking throughout this symposium, on how prevalent feminist theory is in the presenter’s citations, and also how over-represented women and queer and non-binary people are in the researchers investigating ecological emotions (not just here, but generally). I suppose its a rhetorical question – we know the answer generally, its toxic masculinity and patriarchy – but I am interested in people’s thoughts on why this is *still* the case, and any specifics about why emotions are still rarely considered outside of explicitly feminist spaces (other than in psychology I guess).
Thanks, Noemi for your comments and Sango for doing the presentation and responding to the comments. Regarding the question of how male participants express their emotions, we did group discussions and interviews with men across different age groups and I found that some men expressed their emotions openly in the group discussion as well as in individual interviews, especially in relation to the drastic impacts of the dams on their lives and their environment. I did witness some tears from men during FGDs. It may depend on the dynamics of the group and the interactions that can allow men to express their feelings. It may also be that those were shared experiences among the community members and their expressions of strong or sensitive emotions were not new and not something they need to hide. Also, I can say that from my personal experiences as a Cambodian man, when men express emotional expressions of care and kindness are not usually perceived as weak.
Regarding the whether we should label people’s emotions or not, I think there are emotions that highly influence the way people interact and perceive themselves. Those emotions can be indicators to understand their collective actions and resistances. Brené Brown said when we feel “shame” it is about who we are and we tend to hide away from showing up and taking action. My take on this is that instead of avoiding naming emotion at all, we would need to verify with participants how they feel and in what way they want to verbalise their emotional experiences which can be language specific.
Thank you Sopheak!This is very enlightening. I like the idea of verifying with the participants how they feel and what word they put on that feeling and why: the latter is one of the reasons why emotional political ecology research calls for participatory research methods!
Thanks Noémi, Sopheak and Sango for the discussion. I think the question of whether or not, and if so how, to label other’s emotions is a really tricky one. On the one hand, if we don’t, it ignores the relational dimension of emotions (that they are expressed, and are thus communicative, even if that is not always their purpose and even if it is not always easy to interpret), and also that we are capable of empathy: it should not be impossible to ever assess a general emotional state of someone. On the other, of course, it will never be possible to perfectly understand how someone else is feeling, and even if we ask them, people often don’t fully understand their own emotions, or have words for them, and even if they do, they do not always feel able or want to share this. I suppose at the end of the day, being careful about explaining what method (including exploring our own positionality and subjectivity in the context, as that is part of our instrument) is used to do any such assessment is perhaps the critical element.
Anna and Blanche:
Thank you for this great debate. I always find useful interdisciplinary discussions! I find that these discussions around emotional/ care labour tend to be a bit anthropocentric. For some Indigenous people (for example the ones in Nicaragua I know about), forests care for the people: they provide fruits, medicine, firewood, animals to hunt, water, shelter necessary for Indigenous people’s lives and livelihoods, including their emotional well-being very much related to their possibility to exercise their autonomy. Forests are their homes and there is a continuity between bodies and territories: forests and people are involved in an affective two-way relation. Fruits, medicine, firewood, animals to hunt, water, shelter are goods/ wealth are not produced by direct labour nor do they depend strictly on the quantity of labour people put in maintaining the forest. It’s of course not paid labour. Nor is it reproductive labour in my understanding. In the Indigenous cosmovision, people care for the forest and the forest cares for the people (even emotionally). So my question is how do we account for the care labour non-humans provide (to humans and other non-humans) to shift a bit our anthropocentric discussions? … does my question make sense? 🙂
Thanks Noémi for this important question! I am sure Anna’s response would be different to mine, and labour is not really my area of expertise (it definitely isn’t). But, personally I find thinking with labour useful to also think about energy expended by bodies (not just human ones) in the maintenance of life, as well as under capitalism. In this way, not all labour would be exploitative; some of it could be restorative, healing, generative – ecologically reproductive, or socio-ecologically transformative, perhaps. I think Anna might say this is ‘work’ not ‘labour’ (not sure). But for me, paying attention to the energy that has to be put in to maintain livable multispecies relations is important – sustainability (or whatever we call it) is no accident, it takes work from lots of critters and beings! And if we want that to continue, we have to ensure such beings have the support and resources they need to keep doing that work/labour – so we must pay attention to the otherwise unpaid, invisibilised, informal, multispecies work that is going on.
Brilliant, Blanche, thank you! This is really helpful!
Thank you so much everyone for your presentations!
Sango and Sopheak: I have been part of activities where members of Psychology for a Safe Climate did a similar image-choosing activity with climate activists, to explore climate distress. It was also quite transformative, and deeply affective. I wonder if you have any reflections on the emotional/affective intensity of images/visual communication, and whether/when you might use a similar methodology, or what you would change if you did – and whether, in this instance, if you had simply asked people about their feelings, if you think the experiences expressed would have been similar or different?
Andrea and Noémi: I’m so excited by your collaborative work on climate change and affective adaptation. I’d love to know what kind of response you have had since publishing your paper (or through other avenues), or perhaps what the review process was like (if you feel able to share). As you say, climate adaptation is still so modernist/technocentric/rational much of the time, and I find it is often hard to get people to see the value of thinking more relationally and interpersonally. Have you noticed others in the adaptation space starting to appreciate such approaches more?