About the research initiative
Affective terms such as ‘climate anxiety’, ‘ecological grief’, or ‘flight shame’ are highly revealing of some of the major ways environmental change impacts our emotions and cognition today. Even though these terms have emerged during the current climate crisis, people’s existence and emotions have always been impacted by their environmental contexts and changes in these.
We argue that literature, with its slow, long, and complex form, is a medium that preserves and reflects these deeper emotive structures of humanity and the cognitive mechanisms that condition our relationship to the environment.
The relative lack of success of scientific, technological, and socio-political solutions to the current environmental crisis has made us aware of the pressing need for different insight. Such insight will, in this initiative, be harvested from past and modern world literatures which reveal how people have made sense of, coped with and survived changes in their social, political and environmental contexts through the ages.
Purpose
The main aim of this initiative is to discuss how humanity affectively deals with environmental change, as represented in and through literature, from the past and today, both in the North and globally.
This will be done by addressing two main research questions:
- How does literature represent and describe affective responses to environmental change?
- What effect does literature have on our emotions and thoughts, and how can it contribute to sustainability in times of environmental transformations?
By discussing these questions, the initiative will harvest the yet unexploited potential of powerful, large-scale narratives from the past and today, which have the potential to activate new ways of thinking about and relating to our environment.
Financing
Faculty of Humanities, strategic initiatives 2024-2028.
Cooperation
- EcoLit: Ecocritical Literary and Cultural Studies
- Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities (OCEH)
- LCE – Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions
Sub-projects
- Up-coming PhD project, January 2025 – December 2027
- Up-coming postdoc project, January 2025 – December 2027
- Master projects, 2024 and 2025
