Climate Affect is a long-term ethnographic project that will begin in late 2026. It investigates how two different communities in Europe develop and sustain practices of coming to terms with the emotional and psychological toll of the polycrisis — from climate change and eco-anxiety to institutional burnout and attention fragmentation.
This is not a study of mental health in the clinical sense, but of how people come together to make sense of overwhelming realities — how they share affect, co-regulate, and experiment with collective care. The research traces the practices of socializing mental health: alternative infrastructures, decolonial pedagogies, self-organized therapeutic initiatives, and other inventive strategies that go beyond individualizing or privatizing psychic struggle.
While not excluding clinical approaches, Climate Affect focuses on grassroots and interdisciplinary practices that emerge from within communities. It places equal value on somatic workshops, forest walks, and urban rituals of grief as it does on traditional therapeutic discourse.
It will unfold across France and Slovenia, with participant observation, interviews, and embedded collaboration. The aim is to produce not just an academic study, but a polyphonic narrative — one that is attentive to slowness, to difficulty, and to the possibility of feeling differently together.