8 October 2024, 4pm
Simon Building, Room 2.57 [maps and travel]
Online: https://zoom.us/j/94800089942

Dr James Dunk, University of Sydney

Waking Up on a Different Planet: Contemporary Histories of Climate Psychology and Ecological Emotion

Abstract: 

The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has done much to establish the planet as a humanist category, challenging other historians and humanists to revisit the conceptual foundations of late capitalist, globalised modernity in light of earth systems science. This meeting of the global and the planetary particularly animated the French philosopher Bruno Latour in the last decades of his life. We are on a new Earth, he argued, which is different fundamentally from the one we had thought we inhabited. This paper maps the anxieties described by Latour and Chakrabarty – the urgency and difficulty of adjusting to the new presence of the planet – with the emergence of apparently new forms of ecological, or earth, emotion. I briefly survey the still-forming project of climate psychology and show how it has been particularly responsive to shifting emotions of those it seeks to engage and support. I ask whether eco-anxiety, climate distress and associated emotional states represents the prosaic encounter with Earth described by the humanists, exploring what those working in climate psychology have learned and reflect on possible implications for those working within the planetary health and climate change and mental health frames.

Dr James Dunk is Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, where he leads the planetary mental health theme in the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts. A historian and interdisciplinary researcher, his research, teaching and writing explore how concepts and experiences of self and wellbeing are changing in the face of planetary crises. He is co-director of the Ecological Emotions Research Lab at the University of Sydney and convenes a community of practice on dialogical and arts-based approaches to climate distress. His book Bedlam at Botany Bay, a study of madness and mental health in early colonial Australia, won the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize in 2020, and his research has been published in New England Journal of Medicine, Sustainability, History of Psychology, Australian Psychologist and Rethinking History.

All welcome! Please come along if you are interested in the topic.

Image credit: Paul Rhodes – Ask Me I Know of Longing, 2023

Seminar Convenors: Professor Carsten Timmermann and Dr Meng Zhang

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