What is it like to be in the middle of all the complexity, compromise, and complicity associated with climate and ecological crises? Why aren’t we collectively doing something to change course? There is sometimes a view that what’s needed is more and better information: if we raise enough awareness and deepen our data, people will then begin addressing the problems at hand. This, so far, has not worked. In this seminar, we consider the turn to climate feelings as a counter to the information-deficit model and its affiliated theory of change. We will examine co-creating idiosyncratic and imperfect feelings as a generative approach to climate politics, collectivity, and creating worlds that do not end in apocalypse.

Bio: Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. Her current projects investigate how we might understand, bear witness, and respond to unjust histories and complex presents with an eye toward creating different futures. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, and Liberation is Other People (forthcoming 2026).