Emotions, power, and environmental conflict: expanding the ‘emotional turn’ in political ecology

Abstract

Building on the framework of emotional political ecology, we seek to expand ways of studying the relationships between emotion, power, and environmental conflict. Our review of work in feminist studies, human geography, social psychology, social movement theory, and social and cultural anthropology suggests the need for a theoretical framework that captures the psychological, more-than-human, collective, geographical, and personal-political dimensions that intersect subjectivities in environmental conflicts. We stress the need to explicitly consider ‘the political’ at stake when researching emotions in environmental conflicts, and develop a conceptual framework for facilitating nuanced conceptualisations and analyses of subjects and power in environmental conflicts.