Feelings of (eco-) grief and sorrow: climate activists as emotion entrepreneurs

Abstract

This article conceives of climate activists as emotion entrepreneurs to explain the emergence of particular emotional responses to climate change. Among these emotional responses is eco-grief or grief felt because of experienced or anticipated ecological losses. I elaborate on the concept of the emotion entrepreneur and theorize the emergence of eco-grief on the basis of a practice theoretical and Bourdieusian approach. I suggest that activists possessing cultural capital are well positioned to introduce new feelings and identify three mechanisms that contribute to explanations of the emergence and growing importance of eco-grief. Objectivation is about the most often reflexive practice of giving names to emotions to turn them into ontological entities. Cultivation is about the creation of social spaces for the experience and regulation of eco-grief among activists. Diffusion is about emotional contagion, the creation of emotional vocabularies, and the spread of activist feeling rules. Research on emotion entrepreneurs moves beyond conceptions of feelings as causes of activism and suggests there is a need for further research on emotional dynamics in heterogenous transnational advocacy coalitions, influences of language on emotions, and feelings rules in late-modern Western societies.

Neo-emotions: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda

“…More still, words like "nostalgia" and "schadenfreude" are nearly as cumbersome as the more simplistic, "longing for the past" or "delight in another's suffering." Their newness means they risk being misunderstood across situations and groups, and yet it is their novelty that makes them enticing as cultural practices to pick up and use, either to name the emotion as a shared/collective feeling or to set oneself apart by use of a resource that signals membership in an exclusive group or as an emotion entrepreneur (as a form of distinction, discussed more below, Bourdieu, 1996;Holthaus, 2022).…”

“…Albrecht defines solostalgia as the pain and distress caused by "negative environmental change" (38) and details the term's spread among climate activists, in popular culture, among academics, and its alignment with the emotional turmoil of geographically dispersed and vulnerable groups, including the First Nations people of his native Australia and activists fighting mountaintop removal in Appalachia. Solastalgia is just one of many climate emotions that can include compassion, hope, anxiety, fear, and grief, the latter being at times reframed as "eco-grief" (Holthaus, 2022) that includes particular rituals, such as the memorial service held for the first melted glacier in northwest Europe, Okjökull in Iceland (Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021). 16 Neo-emotions can entail the labeling of a completely new feeling or set of feelings.…”

“…If it was purely an issue of linguistic efficiency, how do we make sense of examples of “talking, feeling, thinking” our way through difficult-to-process encounters, times when many words are needed for individuals to make sense of their emotional lives (see Cottingham & Erickson, 2020)? More still, words like “nostalgia” and “schadenfreude” are nearly as cumbersome as the more simplistic, “longing for the past” or “delight in another's suffering.” Their newness means they risk being misunderstood across situations and groups, and yet it is their novelty that makes them enticing as cultural practices to pick up and use, either to name the emotion as a shared/collective feeling or to set oneself apart by use of a resource that signals membership in an exclusive group or as an emotion entrepreneur (as a form of distinction, discussed more below, Bourdieu, 1996; Holthaus, 2022).…”

“…11 In the incongruence between pre-established emotion terms and experiences with the world, social actors reconfigure emotion terms, combining, inventing or subverting them, and, in a constructionist approach, bring into the world new emotions. Individuals who create neo-emotion terms might be framed as emotion entrepreneurs because of their “reflexive practice of giving names to emotions to turn them into ontological entities” and their “linguistic and epistemic innovation” (Holthaus, 2022, p. 3) can amount to a novel “pedagogy of feeling” (Gould, 2009, p. 69). But to be innovative, their naming must be received as valued and meaningful, usually building on the entrepreneur's status, authority, and access to cultural capital (scientific or artistic standing that gives them cache, see Holthaus, 2022) as well as the shared conditions among a broader group that render their innovations persuasive.…”