ABSTRACT
Emotional resilience is often advocated as an important remedy for climate anxiety. However, this approach risks re-centring the needs of individual humans (and often privileged ones). This chapter theorises and argues for affective transformation as an alternative aspiration. Affective transformation can be cultivated through encountering, witnessing and storying climate change, which the previous three chapters discussed. Affective transformation disrupts and reconfigures the emotional regime of individualistic anthropocentrism, and contributes to emergent understandings of the ‘self’ as embedded in, and composed of, relations with the more-than-human world. It also cultivates an ability to keep going in the face of the devastating realities of climate change. As such, affective transformation involves appreciating that climate is living-with and it enables us to learn to live with climate change. Through its emphasis on cultural, emotional and interpersonal change as action, affective transformation therefore enables people to bear worlds: to generate more promising relationships while enduring the distress of current worlds. This chapter concludes by offering guidance about the kinds of action that educators, teachers, activists and other facilitators can take in order to support and engage people in the ongoing work of learning to live with climate change.
