Embodying Research
Climate feelings & healing the subject/object split
I have a hard time explaining what it is that I do, because at first glance the practices and offerings I have honed over the years may seem very disparate & not very cohesive. I have struggled to figure out a succinct way to brand myself & my work as a result, and have come to a place where I feel like the right people will get it. And they often do. I identify as a disaster and climate change researcher, and this is true. I sometimes tell people I am a meditation and somatics instructor, which is also sometimes true. A number of people in my life know me as a crisis counselor, and this is also true. A friend recently introduced me to her roommate with “Caroline creates collective containers for climate grief,” and this is also true. Ultimately I am a person who wants to understand, create knowledge and meaning around, and organize people to practice what it means to be a caring person surviving the Anthropocene. This underlying motivation acts as a compass for whatever manifestation this care takes professionally and in my personal life.
Doing research comes naturally to me, as I suspect it does to many of us as we are all born with a curiosity about the world we’ve incarnated into. There are many social conditions that can shape us away from that curiosity, but I’ve luckily managed to keep it and channel it towards professional goals, like contributing to humanity’s shared capacity to experience climate change as transformative. One way I’ve done that is by working with the Consortium for Equitable Disaster Resilience, a research & practice group founded at Tulane’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy to address disaster recovery justice at the grassroots level. Our first task was a literature review (Obstacles to Equitable Disaster Recovery) looking at all of the scholarship written about obstacles marginalized people face to getting the available federal disaster recovery funding. We combed hundreds of journal articles, book chapters, government reports and other documents to assemble a pretty long list of obstacles. I never thought I would know as much about insurance as I do as a result of this work. The list of obstacles is long, and involves large systemic ones like racism and how discrimination manifests through zoning practices like red lining, as well as obstacles like exhausted and overworked FEMA employees. Being a part of a team who put together a first of its kind exhaustive list of reasons disaster recovery in the US is not actually helping marginalized communities taught me a lot about how the research sausage gets made, in a whole spectrum of ways.
One of my takeaways from this experience was a curiosity about the ways research, as it is practiced in academia and scientific journal writing, so expertly separates us from that which we are meant observing, when in reality we are often an inextricable part of the systems we are investigating. This subject-object split is what makes empirical research possible, and has yielded a lot of the technological progress that bolsters the human-made systems in which we live. This split is also responsible for the ways we understand ourselves as individuals rather than relational beings living in interdependence with each other and the natural world, as well as the mind/body split. I won’t go into the whole Descarte-driven way this has us completely misunderstand how we exist and who we are, but I will say that as a person working on healing so many of these splits, it makes my chosen career a little interesting.
The way I have chosen to navigate this, as I research things like climate emotions and what makes grassroots disaster relief organizations successful in distributing funds equitably, is a guiding question about how to embody what I am working on, and how to make the work more relational. In 2022 I had spent 6 months doing research for the director of the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy about how psychologists are measuring and quantifying emotions about climate change. There are a number of scales that have been developed, many focusing on an ill-defined term “climate anxiety,” which all hope to offer mental health practitioners an evidence-based way to understand how people are being mentally and emotionally impacted by climate change. For months, I plotted emotions, definitions, and scales into spreadsheets and tried to draw data-based findings about the ways the climate crisis can drive emotional experiences. Some of the studies used older terms like fear or grief, and some used newly minted concepts like solastalgia and eco-angst. I am a person who is very interested in the ways language and words shape our experience, so I think this was important work. But I was also left feeling like there was a sort of violence in coding emotions and dropping them into grids. A somatic perspective on emotions includes the sense that they are information in the body about interactions with the environment (including the social environment), information that informs actions that bring us to completion. Completion actions can include running, shaking, engaging, protecting. So what happens when the research methods and conceptual frameworks we use dam up the flow?
I think a lot about how to work with those dams, to loosen them so that the emotional energy can flow freely once again. In the case of climate emotions, this work came in the form of a 2023 virtual workshop called Embodying the World: Climate Change, Sensations, and Relations with friends & colleagues Kate Schapira (of the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth) and LaUra Schmidt (of the Good Grief Network). The conference was called Environment, Justice and the Politics of Emotion. We thought it was a perfect opportunity to take the tendency of academic conferences to be fairly disembodied and theoretical and bring a sense of actually embracing that we scholars and practitioners are people with our own emotions about the crises we work with. We are not separate, even if the process of research asks us to imagine ourselves as somehow not actually present in the equation. This disappearing of ourselves from the relational web we are investigating actually has serious consequences both for the knowledge we create and for ourselves as practitioners.
During our virtual workshop, we facilitated reflective and somatic practices to support each other weathering stress and sorrow, and feeling whatever joy is available. This involved somatic practices like orienting, reflective practices of uncovering memories of times we were supported by humans and the non-human realm, and the use of imagination to ideate more just and liveable futures. We simply did not evolve to be able to metabolize the enormous survival threats of ecological and climate collapse, which are themselves the results of the crises of capitalism, colonialism and separation from our interdependence with Earth, alone. No one person is equipped to hold all of that charge as an individual. And yet that is what the dominant culture asks of us. Rather, we evolved to metabolize stress together, through distributed dependency and mutual support. That is how our body-mind-spirit works, through relationality. This workshop planted some seeds, through direct experience, for that to unfold over time for participants and for us as facilitators.
Those seeds continue to sprout and grow. This past weekend I drove a few hours into the Catskills to meet Kate for a Climate Anxiety & Community Care workshop at Bushel Collective in Delhi, NY.. Kate read to us from her excellent new book Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World, and facilitated some of the exercises we had facilitated during the Politics of Emotion conference. We broke into pairs and discussed the bodily sensations and stuck places we experience when in conversation about climate change. I came around to the need for grace, both for myself and in conversation with others, recognizing when I and others are coming from a quite reasonable sense of survival threat when attempting to work together to address and survive the impacts of climate change and related disasters. Kate is an amazing facilitator who balances this grace with a fierceness around guiding people towards relationality and away from internalized individualism. I appreciate this so much since I have participated and witnessed so many attempts at organizing that unwittingly replicate the separation inherent in ignoring our shared relational reality. We have to have trusting relationships where we can reflect back to each other when this is happening, and shift back towards the threads that connect us. Kate models community care in her work and in her friendship, and I am so glad to have her as a comrade is this movement towards care & repair.
A prompt to work with today could be: in what ways am I dropping & chopping my experience into spreadsheets and grids? Of course, there is some wisdom and satisfaction in categorization (I live this and love sorting things) but where does it detach me from the flow and movement of experience, and how can I come back to that flow? Where are the dams that can be dissolved? Where can I simply allow?
If we have lived through trauma, disaster, shock and crisis, bracing and staunching the flow of feeling and sensation makes a lot of sense. Our brilliant bodies help us manage the unmanageable. And still, the feelings want to move us. Often, towards each other. So that we can reclaim our shared capacity to move collectively into liveable futures, strengthened by mutual support. Do the research, practice scholarship, AND notice the ways these practices can involve more embodiment, felt sense and relationality. I speculate that the climate crisis is in some way Earth inviting us back into our bodies in this mutually supportive way. Let’s help each other heed that call.