Émotions, climat et environnement

Émotions, climat et environnement. Perspectives historiques (18e-21e siècles) / Emotions, Climate, and the Environment. Historical Perspectives (18th-21st centuries)



Workshop / Journée d'étude


24 May 2024 - Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po, Paris

'Solastalgia', 'eco-anxiety', 'eco-grief': in the past two decades, neologisms have flourished to describe how climate change and human-induced environmental damages are giving birth to new emotional states. But the idea that climate can drive us mad or sad is not entirely new. By bringing together environmental history, medical history and the history of emotions, this workshop seeks to historicise our emotional relation to climate and the natural environment.

Bringing together scholars from Australia, France, Switzerland, the UK and the US, the workshop will try to map how our emotional perceptions of climate(s), weather and the environment evolved from the 18th to the 21st century, and how climatic and natural elements were related to emotions such as fear, anxiety, or pleasure in specific historical, social, and political contexts. It will offer the opportunity to study how emotions are shaped by personal experiences, collective representations, medical and lay knowledges. It will also allow to identify potential sources for an emotional history of the environment, such as private diaries, weather almanacs, medical treatises, and psychiatric archives.

The talks will be given in French and in English.

Programme and registration: https://histecon.fr/emotions_climate_environment/index.html

This workshop is organised by Anatole Le Bras. It is funded by the Centre for History and Economics in Paris and hosted by the Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po.

Programme



24 May 2024
9:00am - 5:45pm

Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po
Room K.008
1 place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin
Paris


Morning chair: Anatole Le Bras (Centre for History and Economics in Paris)


9:00 - 9:15am Anatole Le Bras, Introduction

9:15 - 10:45 Emotional perceptions of the weather
 

Anouchka Vasak
 "Où sont les neiges d'antan ? Brève histoire de la perception du froid"
[A brief attempt to historicise the perception of the cold]

Clare Hickman (Newcastle University)
"Air, weather and multispecies encounters: An exploration of patients' environmental experiences of British modern medical institutions"


10:45 - 11:00 coffee break


11:00 - 12:30 Medical inquiries


Eva Yampolsky (Université de Genève)
"Climate and seasonality as factors of suicidality in 19th-century French psychiatric discourse"

Léo Bernard (IFRIS)
"Une science enchantée. S'émerveiller de l'influence du cosmos sur la vie humaine (première moitié du XXe siècle)"
[Enchanted science. Studies on the cosmos' influence on human life in the first half of the 20th century]


12:30 - 2:00pm lunch break


Afternoon chair: Giacomo Parrinello (Sciences Po)


2:00 - 3:30 Deadly and crazy emotions


Thomas Dodman (Columbia University)
"From nostalgia to solastalgia: the history and nature of an emotion"

Rebecca Jones (La Trobe University)
"Navigating crazy weather in arid Australia. 1900s-1950s"


3:30 - 3:45 coffee break


3:45 - 5:15 Psychopathology of the environmental crisis


Maïa Fansten (Université Paris-Cité)
"Eco-anxiety: the significance of a new emotion, between psychology and politics"

Sandrine Aumercier
"Psychanalyse, mélancolie environnementale et crise du capitalisme"
[Psychoanalysis, environmental melancholia, and the crisis of capitalism]


5:15 - 5:45pm General discussion