Brown Bag Lunch seminar: Ecological Grief as an Open Question

In this talk, Marzia Varutti will approach ecological grief as psychologically, socially, politically and ethically relevant. Building on this premise, she will point at possible directions for further work around the concept (among others: expanding grief vocabulary; integrating cross-cultural perspectives; accounting for intangible ecological losses such as loss of imagination). From there, she will move onto more speculative ground by sharing a series of questions she is currently dwelling on: is grief a privilege? How do we deal with hierarchies of grievability among more-than-human others? How might grief relate to hope? And to imagination? She will not attempt to provide answers nor closures, but offer instead some thoughts for preliminary contextualization and further group discussion.

About the speaker

Marzia Varutti
Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg

Marzia’s research bridges museology, environmental humanities, emotion studies, and ecocriticism. She is interested, among other things, in emotions in museums; the affective power of ecopoetry; human and more-than-human relationalities, as well as ecological grief. She is still trying to figure out how to live with the questions she researches.

About the seminar series: “Anthropocene harms, Anthropocene healing?”

This seminar series aims to explore a range of cognitive, relational, and emotional issues that are intertwined with biosphere change. The series is jointly organized by the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University,  The Anthropocene Laboratory at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Global Resilience Partnership.