Doomsday Vibes: Feeling vs Knowing the Anthropocene

March 28, 2024

Location: UNC106 Student Union Theatre
Address: 3272 University Way
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:00

2024-03-28 18:30:00 2024-03-28 08:00:00 America/Vancouver Doomsday Vibes: Feeling vs Knowing the Anthropocene To think with global warming is inescapably to produce bad feeling, in ourselves or in others. The emergence of psychological constructs like climate anxiety, ecogrief, and solastalgia reflect a growing interest in managing or mobilizing dark moods in a global context where data about climate change, and more and more of it, has not led to the substantive societal transformations called for with increasing urgency by experts, activists, and advocates alike. This failure of knowledge to produce societal change has led to a renewed interest in the power of emotions for developing coping mechanisms against an uncertain (or perhaps certainly doomed) future, for resilience-building in the aftermath of disasters, and for empowering individuals through consciousness-raising and collective action. This talk attunes to expressions of bad feeling indexing gaps within the knowable and foreseeable of global warming, arguing that the turn to emotions presumes a fullness or completeness to knowledge that it does not have. UNC106 Student Union Theatre 3272 University Way events@kelownanow.com
To think with global warming is inescapably to produce bad feeling, in ourselves or in others. The emergence of psychological constructs like climate anxiety, ecogrief, and solastalgia reflect a growing interest in managing or mobilizing dark moods in a global context where data about climate change, and more and more of it, has not led to the substantive societal transformations called for with increasing urgency by experts, activists, and advocates alike. This failure of knowledge to produce societal change has led to a renewed interest in the power of emotions for developing coping mechanisms against an uncertain (or perhaps certainly doomed) future, for resilience-building in the aftermath of disasters, and for empowering individuals through consciousness-raising and collective action. This talk attunes to expressions of bad feeling indexing gaps within the knowable and foreseeable of global warming, arguing that the turn to emotions presumes a fullness or completeness to knowledge that it does not have.