Please note that this event is for Mistra Environmental Programme partners only. 

Environmental Communication: Feelings and Facts

The way we understand and communicate about environmental issues is closely linked to feelings, facts and conflicts. Together these aspects not only shape our understanding but also impact our actions in relation to environmental issues.

What is considered a fact and what is considered credible knowledge is dependent on social, cultural and institutional norms, and nowadays expert knowledge is increasingly called into question. Conflicts about what is truth and whose knowledge counts are many and seem to be increasing in intensity. Here emotions play a central role: both in how conflicts are understood and develop, but also in what is understood to be credible knowledge (and from which source!) emotions are central.

When: October 7
Where: LUX, Lund

Programme

11.30: Lunch and Registration  

13.00-13.30: Welcome and Introduction  

13.35-14.35: Parallel Session 1 

Session 1: Living with Climate Disruptions: Feeling, Knowing and Contesting Environmental Change  

Eva Lövbrand, Aysem Mert 

Climate disruptions do not only produce material damage. They also generate uncertainty, grief, anxiety, anger, attachment, blame, hope and disagreement. These affective dimensions shape environmental communication: how environmental change is understood and narrated, whose knowledge and experiences are recognised, who is asked to adapt, and who is held responsible.

This session explores how environmental crises and climate disruptions are communicated, felt, known and contested. Rather than approaching environmental communication primarily as the transmission of information from experts to publics, the session starts from the assumption that environmental crises are lived and communicated through multiple forms of knowledge, affective experience, political conflict and everyday meaning-making.

To do this we invite participants to take two minutes to choose an “affective object”: an object, image, sound, word, quotation, screenshot or fieldnote fragment connected to their work. Participants will briefly describe their chosen object and how it communicates an affective dimension of their project. The exercise will provide a starting point for identifying connections, differences and possible collaborations across the programme.

The session aims to create space for cross-programme discussion and collaboration by collectively reflecting on how feelings, knowledges and conflicts enter into and shape our different environmental communication projects.

Session 2: Processes of meaning-making in environmental communication – empirical findings 

Focus Area Meaning Making Team 

Emotions play an important role in sustainability transitions. The existential threats of climate change and biodiversity loss worry many people and generate a range of emotions, such as anxiety, anger and hopelessness. In the focus area Meaning-making we understand these emotions as individual, but also as social and often collectively felt. We have together with our societal partners, investigated the role of emotions in guided visits at Historiska museerna Moderna museet, and Naturum Skrylle. In this session we will share our way of integrating environmental communication and environmental psychology in the study of emotions and interpretation of preliminary findings. We will invite you to join group discussions to reflect upon these findings in relation to your learnings made and knowledge gained within M-EC 

14.35-15.00: Fika 

15.00-16.00: Parallel Session 2

Session1: Four takes on Emotion

Marlis Wullenkord, Martin Westin, Shiv Ganesh and Carin Graminius 

Please join our session about: 

• empathetic conversations 
• affective polarisation 
• critical feeling 
• collective feeling

and how they (don’t) relate! Through 4 mini-lectures, a panel debate on tensions, overlaps and relevance and applicability, and 4 devoted discussion tables, we will together explore these four ways of understanding emotions 

Session 2: Making Bästeträsk: Environmental Performativity, Facts, Feelings and the Making of a National Park 

Jasmine Zhang, Anke Fischer and René Van Der Wal. 

This 60-minute session explores the planned formation of Bästeträsk National Park on northern Gotland through the lens of environmental performativity. The presentation examines how the national park is progressively made through ecological inventories, classifications, planning documents, participatory processes, stories and nature interpretation. Particular attention is given to how facts, values and feelings shape which species, habitats, places, practices and histories become visible, meaningful and actionable within the suggested national park process. Nature interpretation is considered not only as a means of communicating an already established national park, but as part of the storycrafting and place-making through which the park itself takes shape. It asks which actors and stories are amplified, transformed or lost as they move from scientific and planning documents into interpretive themes and public narratives. 

16.10-17.10: Synthesis Workshop 

M-EC has over the timespan of seven years produced new research findings and is to produce much more the coming year. During this synthesis workshop we will discuss:  

• What patterns can we see?  
• How can diverse results speak together?  
• Are there any emerging themes and conclusions that we would like to dig deeper into together?  

This synthesis workshop aims to set a foundation for integration of our outcomes across Focus Areas, Strategic Reserve Projects and spin-offs.    

17.10-17.20: Wrap Up 

17:30: Guided Walk of Lundagård and Its Buildings 

For those who wish to discover the Lundagård park and its historical buildings. You will be guided by Therese Ek, Lund University 

18.30: Dinner at LUX