Environmental Grief, Hope and Beyond
International workshop organised by the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice
Date: 28-30 August 2023
Conference Venue: The historical building of the University of Pardubice, Room 03004 (nám. Čs. legií 565, 530 02 Pardubice, Czech Republic)
Keynote speakers:
Nora Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki)
Rupert Read (University of East Anglia)
Tom Whyman (Durham University)
The workshop will include a screening of the film „White on White“ followed by a discussion with the film's director Viera Čakányová
Attendance is free of charge. No need to register in advance.
For further information please email Ondřej Beran (ondrej.beran@upce.cz)
Conference description
As the long ongoing environmental and climate crisis has, at last, become widely publicly acknowledged and discussed, the forms of response to it have expanded their scope as well. Now it is no longer only the matter of understanding (as scientists) the processes and impacts of climate change, but of accommodating the awareness of these impacts in our everyday lives.
Thus, there has been a recent surge of the coverage – by researchers, artists, media, news – of the ways in which people acknowledge the current predicament: environmental grief, climate anxiety, ecological anger, also more “niche” responses such as melancholia. These responses typically have a negative “spin”, they are unpleasant, even painful experiences; which is one of the reasons why they are – not uncontroversially – often construed in terms of a mental health issue or a mental health threat.
On the other hand, there are open avenues of working with these emotions that resist this reading: accepting our sense of guilt and responsibility, finding hope in the midst of despair (and where to find it), making use of our anger by turning it into an organised (political) action. Though there has been much philosophy done recently about the climate crisis and climate politics, environmental emotions have, until now, been mainly discussed by other disciplines than philosophy. The ambition of this workshop is thus to bring together voices interested in discussing environmental emotions philosophically, both in view of their dominant distinctively negative, unpleasant tonality, and in relation to what lies or may lie beyond this dominantly negative focus.
