Keynotes
Paul Hoggett:
From COP15 in Copenhagen to COP26 in Glasgow
Biography
Paul Hoggett is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at UWE, Bristol where, with Simon Clarke, he was a Director of the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. In 2012, with Adrian Tait, he founded the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and was its first chair. He recently edited a collection of CPA research papers, Climate Psychology: On Indifference to Disaster (2019, Palgrave Macmillan) and along with Wendy Hollway, Chris Robertson and Sally Weintrobe has a new book out with Phoenix called Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death. Paul’s previous books have included Politics, Identity and Emotion (2009, Paradigm) and Partisans in an Uncertain World (1992, Free Association Books).
Abstract
Climate psychology, as a social critique and as an emancipatory practice, began to take off in 2009 in the aftermath of the disappointment of COP 15 in Copenhagen. A psycho-social approach was central to this development. It informed the way in which the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) approached the question of individual and cultural disavowal and subsequently, as more and more of the global North appeared to come out of disavowal, it informed our exploration of climate-related anxiety and despair. And in undertaking this exploration we began to understand how such existential precarities, so new to the wealthy of the North, were so familiar to the lives of the billions inhabiting rest of the globe.
Twelve years later we have had to endure perhaps the even deeper disappointment of COP 26 at Glasgow and now, as I write, of a world perhaps already tipping into a state of permanent ecological and social disruption and collapse. That social and political chaos would swiftly attend climate chaos was an idea that many within the climate movement had anticipated. During these twelve years we have been forced to question many of our self-limiting assumptions and have been led towards new realisations – that we need to go beyond the psycho-social to the ‘eco-psycho-social’; of just how deeply racism, classism and patriarchy constrain the way in which ‘we’ see ourselves and the world; indeed of just how specific and partial this ‘we’ is that ‘we’ speak of.
Shelot Masithi:
Climate Change and Thirst
Biography
Shelot is a young environmental activist from South Africa. She is a psychology student with a passion for collective interventions for mankind’s collective trauma. She is the founder of She4Earth; an organisation that’s educating children and youths about environmental crises with solutions rooted in Ubuntu. She is a volunteer at Force of Nature, a Social Change Ambassador at Thred Media, and YOUNGA 2021 Youth Delegate. She is also an author and a passionate hiker.
Abstract
The psychology of not having enough water to drink is immediate – this has heightened widespread anxiety and frustration amongst people, especially youths. As a young person, I am torn between solving the climate issues I live with daily and being a youth free of this burden. World leaders pledged, not just to us in this room, but to the whole world during COP26, that they’ll put an end to climate inaction. However, it is frightening that we have not seen them since. Suffocating in thirst, eco-anxiety and the trauma left by climate catastrophes, young people like me continue to be the bigger person in the room.
Individual psychology is a largely British import into the African continent. Psycho-social Studies and Climate Psychology have the intention of shedding or at least reforming that legacy by paying respectful attention to the more collective traditions of the colonised world. If we took the perspective of ubuntu and applied it to water scarcity and the collective experience of thirst, where will that lead a community like my own to go beyond post-COP inaction and take into our own hands the prospect of improving that frightening future?
This is what I shall begin to map in my talk.
