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FS 3.177

Experiences of Loss and Future Imaginaries

Details

Full Title
FS 3.177: From Experiences of Loss to Transformation: Reimagining Mountain Areas in Times of Crisis and Beyond
Scheduled
TBA
Location
TBA
Convener
Carlotta Sauerwein-Schlosser
Co-Conveners
Anna-Maria Brunner,
Assigned to Synthesis Workshop
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Thematic Focus
Adaptation, Socio-Ecology, Sustainable Development
Keywords
loss, climate change, social change, socio-ecological transformation, future imaginaries

Description

A feeling of loss is currently shaking society’s faith in desirable futures. As a consequence of upheld unsustainable society-nature relations, which culminated in intertwined global crises, this sentiment is no longer understood as a psychological phenomenon but as a collective social experience. These characteristics of our time become particularly evident in mountain areas. Glaciers are dwindling, vital precipitation is either scarce or so heavy that economic sectors are losing planning security and people are losing their livelihoods, and the exodus of young people from peripheral communities is not only causing the disappearance of essential infrastructures, but also the erosion of traditions and community cohesion. In this session, we pose the question of how these experiences of loss shape the actions and (future) imaginaries of people living in mountain areas. We aim to assemble theoretical and empirical insights into the experience of loss and hence to explore the narratives surrounding these experiences, along with their practical implications and repercussions on future imaginaries. We specifically invite researchers from human geography, sociology and applied psychology concerning the following questions:

Is loss a one-way path to resignation, or does it also open (imaginary) pathways toward socio-ecological transformation?
What kind of future visions and ideas guide the actions of people living in mountain areas?
How can we study the future(s) of these areas considering the often-neglected aspects of affectivity and alternative understandings of human-environment relations?

Submitted Abstracts

ID: 3.8418

The Mountains Travel: Stations of Migrant Territorialities.

Luis Ortiz

Abstract/Description

Mountains have been often places of colonial fracture and capitalist extractivism as well as of refuge and resistance. In times of necropolitics (Mbembe), the relations with them are frequently marked by death and destruction. This artistic research, a Phd-in-Practice project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, looks for ways to ethically re-relating with the mountains and acknowledging their interactions with us, particularly as migrant territories. That is, not as fixed entities but as territories traveling and transforming. The project considers indigenous epistemologies of territory as a place in ontological relation with all related beings and a feeling-thinking understanding of the world. These concepts are expanded through the Aymara ch’ixi positionality, the ambivalent mixture of fractured cultures, according to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that presents how beings are and are not simultaneously. These ideas and the resistance of the mountains’ inhabitants bring possibilities of existence in the apparently empty spaces between the mountains. These spaces represent the (ultimately artificial) fractures of relationalities that the colonialism-capitalism complex produces locally and globally. The methodology develops a weaving in the wind of diverse mountain-beings precisely in those spaces. Through exercises of listening to our silences, the silences of the mountains and strategies of poetical resistance, a chain of relational artworks is created that helps to relate to the mountains. These artworks were created in collaboration with several communitary partners in four different phases (stations) in Germany, Mexico and Colombia, aimed at understanding mountains as traveling the spirals of space-time. This understanding is based upon indigenous epistemologies of time and belonging with the whole world as territory. The project focuses especially on the traveling of the mountains and their related beings along global value chains, a Global South-to-North movement that also corresponds to several migrational movements. In that way, human and nonhuman migration is also considered a form of movement of bodies-territories. Luis Ortiz was a recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

ID: 3.11410

Scientific co-investigations with high school student as sentinels of global warming between grief and hope (Anti-Atlas Morocco).

David Goeury
Zahi, Khadija

Abstract/Description

High school student should be considered as an anthropocenic sentinel category capable of providing us with information on the issue of global warming. They are under an institutional obligation to make a very rapid choice of educational and vocational direction. As a result, they are taking stock of the environmental, economic and social situation, while looking to the future. They are aware of climate mechanisms and the irreparable losses caused by global warming. Many of them expressed both their grief at the transformation of an area that is less and less habitable and their hope for a better future through education and professional advancement. A minority who are failing at school are in great distress, raising the question of what positive narratives can be developed apart from those linked to academic and professional success, which is most often envisaged outside mountain areas. We would like to draw on a study carried out in a rural boarding school in the Anti-Atlas region of Morocco. We carried out a quantitative questionnaire survey of 102 pupils to discuss the relationship between global warming and school careers. This survey was backed up by a film co-investigation in which 34 volunteers described their perceptions of environmental change, particularly drought’s impacts. The pupils remain deeply attached to their region and to farming activities, despite the disappearance of the latter as a result of consecutive years of drought. The pupils describe the collapse of their sensitive world and the depopulation of their territory (disappearance of plants, animals and humans). They explain how global warming and especially drought are affecting their village, their family and their daily lives. However, the collapse affects boys and girls differently. While all the girls see continuing their studies as a way of improving their future lives, despite the climatic conditions, the older boys who are having difficulty at school overwhelmingly project themselves outside of school, without envisaging a desirable future. These boys appear to be much more pessimistic, as they often experience global warming very directly as an immediate loss of income, as well as the impossibility of inheriting their family’s agricultural heritage.

ID: 3.11426

Playing the way through: combining science, psychology and visioning exercises for middle school students to think about mountain community futures

Maria Da Re
Scolozzi, Rocco; Zarabara, Francesca

Abstract/Description

The environmental crisis represents a societal challenge, heavily impacting both physical and psychological well being and soliciting a wide range of eco-emotions (complex feelings associated with environmental change). The bidirectional relationship between some eco-emotions (e.g. eco-anxiety) and pessimistic visions of the future can negatively impact the individual’s sense of agency. In this respect, young people figure among the most vulnerable social groups. Current literature supports the crucial role of both science communication and eco-psychology in finding new ways to convey the urgency of addressing the climate crisis. It is believed that increased awareness of both the scientific aspects and the psychological impacts of the environmental crisis can contribute to greater resilience and active public engagement. Here, we present a workshop conducted in July 2024 involving 21 teenagers between 12 and 14 years old, from a small mountain community of the Friuli Venezia-Giulia region, Italy. The initiative was framed within the BeyondSnow project. The workshop was organized around three core moments and combined scientific education about climate change, an exploration of eco-emotions and the challenge of envisioning a more sustainable future. Firstly, the teenagers engaged in a participatory lesson through dedicated quizzes and group work. Secondly, the workshop provided a space to explore eco-emotions with a modified version of the popular “four corners game” and the use of paper silhouettes. Lastly, the workshop encouraged participants to imagine a variety of futures for their mountain community using the Design Thinking method of personas. The audience of this presentation will be invited to try some visioning and emotional exploration exercises, similar to those from the original workshop. Students experienced collaborative learning activities on the causes of the human-induced climate crisis and its effects, also on local mountainous ecosystems. The activity on eco-emotions provided an opportunity to acknowledge the range of different emotions elicited by environmental issues. The reflection on possible futures, including the evolving needs, behaviors, and expectations of the community, helped the participants to become more aware of their agency in the present, inspired by a variety of possible futures. If continued, these experiences could mitigate the effect of negative eco-emotions.

ID: 3.11489

Encountering Glacial Loss: Perception, Affect, and Future Imaginaries in the Western Alps

Benjamin Buchan

Abstract/Description

Glaciers are dynamic sites of human-nonhuman entanglement, where material transformations intersect with shifting imaginaries of nature and place. In the Monte Rosa region, glacial retreat is not only a physical phenomenon but also a social and affective one, shaping how people perceive, experience, and engage with mountain environments. This paper examines the lived and mediated encounters through which glaciers are made present or absent—whether through direct engagement with the landscape, public discourse, or visual technologies such as repeat photography. Drawing on qualitative research with those who dwell near or interact with glaciers, I explore how these encounters structure affective relations with the ice and contribute to future imaginaries of mountain environments. By situating glacial loss within the broader social construction of nature and human-more-than-human relations, I argue that loss is not merely a rupture but a generative force that reconfigures possibilities for inhabiting and imagining high-altitude landscapes. This perspective challenges deterministic narratives of decline and opens space for alternative socio-ecological futures.

ID: 3.11783

Beyond the tangible: A comparative case study of floods and invisible losses in Mustang, Nepal

Kunja Shrestha

Abstract/Description

Conventional loss and damage assessments have been increasingly criticised for its inability to capture grounded experiences of loss felt by communities, often overlooking the intangible dimensions that carry profound psychological, emotional, social, and cultural implications. While the term non-economic loss has emerged to describe these aspects, the study advocates for invisible loss as a more suitable concept. Taking a pluralistic value-based approach to encapsulate multiple relational subjectivities of Himalayan communities, this study explores the concept of “invisible loss” in the context of floods in the settlements of Lubrak and Kagbeni, Mustang. The findings reveal that Lubrak, being more isolated, experienced greater cultural loss, while Kagbeni, influenced by tourism and modernisation, faced tensions between maintaining tradition and adapting to socioeconomic changes. While this reflects a core-periphery dynamics, emotional losses, particularly a diminished sense of place and identity, were central across both communities. By relying on a core-periphery comparison, the study highlights how experiences of invisible loss vary significantly, emphasising the need for inclusive adaptation strategies that enable communities to live a life they value in the places they belong.

ID: 3.12523

Countering Narratives of Loss in the New Technology Economy of Appalachia

Lauren Hayes

Abstract/Description

Scholars have described the mountainous Appalachian region of the United States in terms of “narratives of export” regarding resources, value, and people. This narrative is exemplified by extractive industries like coal and lumber whose profits have not always returned to Appalachia, and whose practices resulted in absentee land ownership and often caused environmental destruction. The region has also experienced patterns of out-migration due to boom-and-bust conditions of coal, agricultural, and manufacturing industries. Between 1940 and 1970, for example, three million people left Appalachia in search of work in midwestern and northern cities. A continued out-migration of youth for educational and job opportunities has further stressed many small rural towns. The permanent decline of coal and job losses within the industry and adjacent businesses in Appalachia in recent years have prompted a flurry of local efforts to attract opportunities in technology from customer service work to coding and software development, to advanced manufacturing. Some of these organizations and leaders have dubbed this project “Silicon Holler”-a play on the California technology hub called, Silicon Valley, and a local word for valley in a local speech variety. Marketing discourse advertising these efforts largely centers on romanticized representations of male coal miner identity and work ethic with headlines such as, “From coal to code” and “Turning coal country into tech country” and frequently includes plots of job loss, shuttered and decaying rural coal towns, and renewed hope in tech. This paper focuses on the ways people make sense of these new development schemes to transform their economies and address economic and population decline. I show how 1) local leaders, workers, and media draw on nostalgic ideals of a coal mining history and coal miner work ethic to create a hybridized image of a future tech economy that is culturally Appalachian albeit gendered masculine, and 2) how people use symbolic strategies and complex work history narratives to resist and reshape media images of loss. I argue that these various strategies work to counter stereotypes of the region as backward or a-technological, while shaping visions of the future that reflect local cultural memory and practice.

FS 3.176: Water Scarcity in Mountain Areas: Studies on Environmental Conflicts and Governance Proposals for Water Use

FS 3.178: Mountains Matter: An Intercultural Approach to Human Connection and Stewardship of the Outdoors

#IMC: September 14 - 18 2025

FS 3.177

Experiences of Loss and Future Imaginaries

Details

Full Title

Scheduled

Location

Convener

Co-Conveners

Assigned to Synthesis Workshop

Thematic Focus

Keywords

Description

Submitted Abstracts

Abstract/Description

Abstract/Description

Abstract/Description

Abstract/Description

Abstract/Description

Abstract/Description

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