Brown Bag Seminar with Alfred Sköld
Emotions of Climate Activism
Welcome to EHL’s May Brown Bag with Alfred Sköld, EHL guest researcher and Associate Professor of Psychology, who will share with us his important work on the role of emotions in youth climate activism
Tid:
To 2025-05-22 kl 12.00 - 13.00
Plats:
Kitchen, Division of History, Teknikringen 74D
Språk:
English
Medverkande:
Alfred Sköld, Aalborg University
Exportera till kalender
We live in a time of multiple crises and extreme loss. Growing up in the current cultural turmoil means facing not only the rapid rise of global populism, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, new and endless wars, and a looming energy crisis, but also a radically uncertain future due to rising average temperatures, melting glaciers, spreading deserts, and the many associated ecological and sociocultural consequences. Given the perceived lack of urgency from most, if not all, governments, civil societal initiatives supporting collective behavioral change are on the rise worldwide. This lecture focuses on climate activism – a historically unprecedented young political movement that engages an ever-growing number of people across the globe. Drawing on an ethnographic and interview-based study of The Green Youth Movement in Denmark, the lecture seeks to map the role of emotions in youth climate activism. Despair, grief, anxiety, and anger, as well as care, hope, and joy, always exist between the existential universal and culturally specific. What forms and expressions do these emotions take in the context of youth climate activism today? How can we understand the emotional backdrop of political movements in general, and youth climate activism in particular? What drives the struggle for a better world?
Register for the seminar and vegan sandwich here:
www.kth.se/form/ehl-brownbag
Bio
Dr.
Alfred Sköld
is an Associate Professor of General Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and currently a visiting researcher at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. His PhD-dissertation, Relationality and Finitude: A Social Ontology of Grief (2021), focused on the existential and ethical aspects of grief, and his current research project investigates the role of emotions in youth climate activism. Sköld has published extensively on grief and death awareness and is the editor of several anthologies: Kampen om lykken (2020) with Svend Brinkmann, Kærlighedens kartotek (2023), Det syge samfund (2025) with Peter Clement Lund, and Håb – en antologi (2025) with Kresten Lundsgaard-Leth. He has previously been a visiting researcher at Yale University, Södertörn University, and The International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin.
