Bearing worlds: learning to live-with climate change

Abstract

This paper explores the emotional experiences of some undergraduate sustainability students in a semester long course on climate change. Specifically, it attends to experiences of anxiety, frustration, overwhelm, guilt, grief and hope. I suggest these experiences are characteristic of a process I term learning to live-with climate change. Learning to live-with climate change involves attuning to the relational composition of the world and thus the self; mourning desirable relationships that are lost as the planet warms; and responding to these conditions in ways that may foster more liveable worlds. Collectively, these processes enrol people in practices of bearing worlds: enduring the pain of the end of the world they have known, and labouring to generate promising alternatives. As such, these processes reconfigure the self and its relations, and attunement to how climate change composes, recomposes and decomposes particular subjectivities is important. The paper argues that affective adaptation is therefore a crucial element of climate change education.

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Keywords:

• Affect
• adaptation
• emotions
• becoming
• care
• distress
• hope

Acknowledgments

The research for this paper was conducted on stolen Wurundjeri, Boon Wurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung Country. I would like to thank my students, as well as my PhD supervisors Iris Duhn and Lauren Rickards, for supporting me in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Australian Postgraduate Award.

Notes on contributors

Blanche Verlie

Blanche is a lecturer at RMIT University and has recently completed her PhD in climate change education