Guided Reading by Michael Schnegg

Aijazi, Omer. 2024. Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Omer Aijazi shows how war and earthquakes have shaped an atmosphere of violence in the borderlands of Kashmir. His committed analysis focuses on the “fresh but heavy air” that forms between human and non-human bodies, becoming an atmosphere that enables and constrains feelings and behaviors. Aijazi recounts five scenes that bring the reader close to the experience of the region and show how people both shape and are shaped by its particular atmosphere. Importantly, this atmosphere not only causes suffering and distress but also invites projects of repair, as when Sattar Shah confronts the loneliness created by the situation with a friendship with Allah that gives him freedom and sovereignty.

In my view, Aijazi's work represents a larger movement in anthropology to turn emotions inside out and theorize them as atmospheres shaped by the political and social environments that constitute them (Schnegg 2024). In this light, I invite you to think about a situation and its atmosphere in your personal life, including the childhood home, the classroom, fieldwork, the department at the university. Write about how these atmospheres felt, how they were shaped by the larger socio-ecological environment, and how they enabled and constrained your thinking, feeling and behaviors.

Pedagogical Tool by Gerimis Art Project

This teaching tool is developed based on our long-term work with Peninsular Malaysia's indigenous peoples, the Orang Asli, particularly the Semai, Mah Meri, and Temuan groups. Our collective, Gerimis Art, documents and presents the stories, practices, and adaptations of Orang Asli culture and community through artistic means.

The distress we've witnessed in our years of work among the communities springs from disruptions near and far—from land reclamation right by their homes to dams kilometers away, remote but felt. As these disruptions take place, the community's shared lifeworld is also altered. On the surface it seems direct, from macro to micro. As their micro world is intimately intertwined with the macro, ecological and social disruptions threaten the dismissal of all that they've known. But there is a mediator—the person, the individual, the community, and at the core, their sense of self—who navigates these changes.

Change and adaptation, we’ve found, are often responses to distresses of people’s senses of selfhood. However, these responses are not resignation, but forms of resistance and resilience in the face of losing their identity in a world that systematically ignores them. We are not denying the presence of grief, instead we are encouraging the act of witnessing these ecological, material, spiritual, ritual, and cosmological disruptions.

This tool guides you to witness. To tell stories as experienced, as told, as seen, as embodied, as expressed, and to reveal truths otherwise unspoken and unwritten.

LINK TO TOOL—Front

LINK TO TOOL—Back

LINK TO TOOL—Book Format

Pedagogical Tool by Shyam Lal, Soujanyaa Boruah, and Sartaj Ghuman

Our contribution looks at ‘ecological stress’ as the unease or anxiety that can be linked causally to changes in ecology. The Anthropocene has seen rapid changes in ecology that affect us all, but these changes are more relevant and their effects more immediately felt by those directly dependent on nature or exposed to its vagaries. A roadside laborer in the city, for instance, may experience global warming more intimately than an office worker. Similarly, rain-dependent agriculture would be more vulnerable to climate change than that dependent on groundwater. This contribution looks at the experience of ecological stress from the perspective of shepherds in the Indian Himalayas. Taking you on a forest walk through their pastures, it gives you a range of tools for thinking about the emotional impact of climate and ecological change.

This tool is part of a larger project pursued by the authors and Nikita Simpson, on ‘tension’ in the Indian Himalayas.

LINK TO TOOL HERE

Writing Exercise: A Speculative Dictionary of Climate Emotion by Susan Wardell

Dictionaries and diagnostic manuals can both be normative technologies. But at a time of vast environmental change, there can be value in exploring new terms. Inspired by the academic work of Glenn Albrecht (2019), and a popular project by John Koenig (2021), this exercise invites you to contribute to a ‘speculative dictionary’ of climate emotion:

1. Scroll through the photos on your mobile device. Pick a photo you have taken recently, of something in nature. Variation: Go to a local/national news website, search ‘climate change,’ and select any associated image.

2. Look at the photo closely: What feeling compelled you to focus in on that subject? Free write for 5–10 minutes.

3. What do you feel, looking at it again now? Free write for 5–10 minutes.

4. Circle/highlight 5 keywords from what you've written.

5. Spring-boarding off these keywords, invent a name for the feeling you noted in prompt 3, and write a short definition.

6. Reflect/discuss the following questions:

   1. How might this feeling be situated in particular local environments, events, or experiences?

   2. How might it connect/orient you to more global or distant happenings?

   3. How might it be related to your own social positionality, or embodied subjectivity?

   4. Is it a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feeling?

   5. What forms of care, intervention, or action does this feeling require or invite?

   6. [In a group]: Are there any recurrent trends or themes?

Upload your entries to the shared online dictionary, if you wish.

Pedagogical Tool: Teaching with Climate Anxiety by Bridget Bradley

Since 2021, I have been researching climate anxiety and teaching a module on planetary health—two endeavors I attribute to my overlapping interest in and personal experience of ecological distress. The notion of ‘climate anxiety’ appeared to have widespread resonance with the students in my Planetary Health classroom which required a sensitive pedagogical approach. In a not-dissimilar situation, I discovered that using mindfulness in the classroom eased anxiety for students during the Covid-19 pandemic (Bradley 2024). Mindfulness is also a useful approach to teach about ecological distress because it has the potential to foreground wellbeing and social justice. Günel and Watanabe (2024) have noted that anthropology in times of crisis demands diverse and flexible methods, but it also demands patchwork pedagogies, an approach that bell hooks might call ”teaching with love” (2003). For me, “teaching with climate anxiety” means acknowledging the despair present in human and more-than-human worlds, and leaning into the distress with a radical honesty and vulnerability which reflexive and activist practices often demand. I have found mindfulness a valuable tool within a pedagogical patchwork that can help students to acknowledge and sit with distressing issues, while creating a learning environment that makes people feel supported and valued.