There were four presenters, each of them offered an hour-long contribution, and thirty-one participants from all major institutions in the Stockholm region. The presentations offered a wide range of perspectives, and the discussions that followed were shaped by attentive and engaged questions. While all the nuances of the day cannot be captured here, a few aspects may be highlighted. The presentations spanned a broad set of themes:
Alfred Sköld,
associate professor of general psychology at Aalborg University, gave a talk entitled Climate Melancholia: Hope, Grief and Despair in the Ecological Crisis which introduced the concept of climate melancholia, contrasting it with grief and despair, and showing how it ties into questions of hope.
Senta Terner
, PhD candidate in History of Ideas at Uppsala University, presented United in Pain: Global Youth Environmental Activism in the Early 1990s, drawing from her PhD work on emotional communities among environmental activists and explored the potential of understanding the young activists as united in pain.
David Thurfjell
, historian of religion and professor of Religious Studies at Södertörn University, reflected in his talk The Metaphorical Qualities of the More-Than-Human on Swedes’ postsecular relationship to “nature,” the ineffable in religious experiences and experiences of nature, and the poetic-scientific attempt to “borrow someone’s eyes”. Finally,
Jonna Bornemark,
professor in philosophy and working at The Center for Studies in Practical Knowledge at Södertörn University, addressed how we might include the more-than-human in our understandings of emotion and desire in her presentationStreams of Desire: Some Notes on Collective Emotions and Beyond – suggesting that emotions can be understood as broader and more relational than the boundaries of the human psyche.
