Emotions are increasingly recognised as central to environmental politics. This PERC seminar, the final in the Environmental Futures series, brought together two scholars whose work explores how emotions are researched, mobilised, and manipulated. It built on work done at the online “Emotional Political Ecology” symposium.
Alice Beban (Massey University) (from 01:15)
How do we know emotion in political ecology?
Alice is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Massey University, and the author of Unwritten Rules: Statemaking through Land Reform in Cambodia.
Over the past two decades, political ecologists have become increasingly aware that resource struggles and more-than-human relations are deeply emotional. But how, exactly, do we know emotion in political ecology? Drawing on a scoping review of all political ecology work over the past two decades that engages with emotion and affect, alongside reflections from her own research, Alice explored how our different epistemologies and methods make emotion visible.
Blanche Verlie (University of Sydney) (from 19:00)
Greenhouse gaslighting: The denial of climate distress
Blanche is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and the author of Learning to Live-with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation.
Rates of “climate anxiety” – deep worry about the impacts of climate change, which can also inspire activism – are rising around the world. In response, efforts to protect fossil fuel interests are increasingly turning to what Blanche terms greenhouse gaslighting: denying, deriding and dismissing people’s experiences of climate-induced distress. In this talk, she outlined greenhouse gaslighting as a patriarchal practice of emotional abuse that is enabled by, and seeks to perpetuate, white-colonial-extractivism.