Fear, hope, anger, and guilt in climate activism
By Jochen Kleres, Å. Wettergren. Social Movement Studies, 2017
333 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Analyzing fear, hope, anger, and guilt in climate activism, we consider these pivotal emotions to climate activists. The way they are managed affects activists’ motivations and mobilizing strategies. This argument builds on the theoretical premise that emotions energize and orient all actions. Qualitative interviews were carried out with climate activists in Denmark, Sweden, and at two UNFCCC Conferences of Youth. Our analysis shows that fear motivates action by raising awareness of the threat of climate catastrophe. The paralyzing potential of fear is mediated by hope: Hope propels action while (collective) action generates hope and manages fear. The danger-alerting capacity of fear is embraced ‘internally’, but rejected as an effective emotion in mobilization. Instead, a hopeful ‘positive message’ is emphasized by activists from the Global North. Anger is treated cautiously as an emotion to be pacified/transformed and guilt/blaming is largely rejected too. There is a different pattern in the southern narratives. Here hope, guilt, and anger combine to manage acute fear. Hope lies in collective action but also in the angry ascription of responsibility to the North. Contrasting the North, acute fear is thus managed by anger. Different patterns of emotion management derive from different political and socio-material contexts/experiences.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, History, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83d5d7292151a50d29c215f2754cb6c3920ea916
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Citations in the corpus
- Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Education (2020, background): “Kleres and Wettergren [82] studied emotions among climate activists from North and South and noticed that there are quite different kinds of emotional cultures and regimes among them, notably in relation to anger and guilt.”
- Bearing worlds: learning to live-with climate change (2019, background): “Thus, for those of us who live in high carbon economies or live high carbon lifestyles, encountering climate change commonly involves the experience of guilt (Lenzen, Dey, and Murray 2002; Randall 2009; Weintrobe 2013; H€oijer 2010; Jacquet 2017; Kleres and Wettergren 2017).”
- Anxiety and climate change: a validation of the Climate Anxiety Scale in a German-speaking quota sample and an investigation of psychological correlates (2021, background): “Different emotional responses to the climate crisis are normative in and contingent on different cultures (see Kleres & Wettergren 2017; Norgaard 2011).”