Eco-Angst: Moving Toward Healing

The Environment and Society Group in UNSW’s School of Humanities and Languages welcomes international scholar Irus Braverman, who will be leading a workshop on how to teach, study, and live with the eco-angst that permeates our classrooms, research sites, and daily existence.

As part of her research on how scientists deal with the mass extinction of species generally, and with the catastrophic impacts of climate change on earth’s marine environments in particular, Braverman has been grappling with feelings of “eco-angst” and identified similar responses for her interlocutors, students, and colleagues. She has found that her active practice of Vipassana (insight meditation), yoga, and dance and her work as a sound and movement-based healer is helpful in this context.

Braverman will draw on her experiences to lead an experimental session that will consider how to identify and engage with eco-angst personally and in the classroom, offering tools for engaging in self-empowering and creative paths, including diary entries, storytelling, ecopoetry, breathwork, and movement. Throughout, we will expand our capacities to “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway refers to this practice.

This will be a two-hour-long session. Please bring a pillow as well as a yoga mat if you have one.

Hosted by Environmental Historian Taylor Sherman, Head of the School of Humanities and Languages.