Constructing a Positive Climate Cosmology: A Qualitative Study of Media and Ecological Anxiety

Abstract

Ecological anxiety (EA) is a phenomenon that refers to a family of anxious emotions and symptoms experienced in response to the climate crisis [1]. It shows a complex constellation of symptoms along personal, cultural, and temporal dimensions, as well as epistemic sprawl - a tendency to interpret even unrelated events as connected to climate change [2]. Despite the evidently intricate lifeworld of EA, current literature tends to overlook phenomenological meaning-making dimensions. Instead, it focuses mostly on acute manifestations of eco-emotions, without considering wider societal influences and coping mechanisms. Additionally, understanding of the specific phenomenological Gestalt of EA, i.e., the kind of lifeworld [3] the individuals who experience EA inhabit, is limited.

This strong connection between the personal experience of EA and the larger societal context that informs it calls for a generative phenomenology approach, which focuses on how broader socio-cultural conditions give rise to specific aspects of experience. For people with EA, knowledge gathering is an important coping mechanism. Therefore, this research uses a triangulation of constructivist grounded theory (CGT) and ecolinguistics discourse analysis (EDA) to investigate the themes that arise within the media that people with EA find helpful in making sense of their experience. The guiding questions are (1) what sort of lifeworld is created in this corpus, and (2) how is it constructed? A subsidiary question narrows the research to suit the scope: how does epistemic sprawl manifest linguistically and narratively within this corpus?

The first phase will consist of a CGT analysis to understand what themes contribute to lifeworld-creation. The analysis will be performed on relevant excerpts of the identified media sources, coding on form and content in three separate rounds. The first will consist of open coding, the second will be focused on epistemic sprawl, and the final round will serve the creation of a final taxonomy. The themes in the final taxonomy will then be further analysed using EDA, which will deepen understanding of how these themes are created. This second phase analysis will combine contextual factors with narrative frames and computer-assisted cognitive linguistic analysis.

The analyses should reveal themes that contribute to meaning-making patterns in climate change media that mirror or address the symptoms experienced by people with EA. Furthermore, the discourses around the different themes will be correlated with different cognitive linguistic structures. Due to the novelty of epistemic sprawl as a concept, it is unknown whether this will show. Nevertheless, a deeper investigation of the media people with EA turn to as a coping mechanism may still show themes that enhance understanding of EA as a lived phenomenon.

References

[1] C. Kurth and P. Pihkala, “Eco-anxiety: What it is and why it matters,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, no. 981814, Sep. 2022. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.981814.

[2] A. Oblak et al., “Inhabiting a Wounded World: A Qualitative Phenomenology of Ecological Anxiety,” unpublished.

[3] G. Stanghellini and M. Mancini, The therapeutic interview in mental health : a values-based and person-centered approach. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017.