Sentipensar [Feel-Thinking] Cultivates Scientific Sensemaking and Worldbuilding Within and Beyond Ecological Despair

• In Event: Climate Emotion, Agency, and Justice in Formal and Informal Settings

Abstract

Objectives. Educating youth about environmental and climate justice is a crucial step toward realizing a flourishing future. Yet, the task of supporting youth as they learn about these topics remains daunting territory for educators, in large part because of the complex feelings and varied psychological responses youth may have (Verlie et al., 2021; McGrath & Schapira, 2024). More needs to be understood about how youth respond affectively to ecological injustices, and the role eco-emotions play in making sense of environmental and climate issues (Verlie et al., 2021; Pihkala, 2020).

Theoretical Framework. To explore this, I used a critical participatory ethnographic approach grounded in Latina Feminist and Anticolonial theories to examine the eco-emotional responses of a single youth, Idra, who took part in an environmental science education program studying marine plastic pollution in Baja California, Mexico. Through Idra’s case I build upon the concept of “Sentipensar” [feel-thinking] (Fals-Borda, 1984; Escobar, 2020), to show how youths’ eco-emotions are both the product of, and a tool for, trying to make sense of the world, as well as a pedagogy of embodied agency––which offers a way for learning to become an authentic site of reclaiming knowledge, feeling, community, action, and worldbuilding within this era of ecological precarity.

Methods: Context, Data Collection, Sources, and Analysis. This research was situated within an environmental education program hosted at a marine field station in a small rural town along the Gulf of California in Mexico that aimed to increase local youths’ access to and stewardship of the Bahía de Los Ángeles Biosphere Reserve, while growing their identities as protectors of the local environment. The data––sets of 90-minute semi-structured interviews of 13 youth participants and field notes from hundreds of hours of observations ––was collected over 18 months and turned into multimedia portraits (Carlone & Johnson, 2007) for a larger study (Author, 2022). Then I used these to identify moments of high affectivity and engaged in iterative rounds of inductive coding (Saldaña, 2013) to refine my hypotheses about how the youth were using their eco-emotions to engage in sensemaking.

Results. Idra’s case shows the range of eco-emotions youth can experience and how practicing Sentipensar can (1) deepen existing understandings of ecological destruction, (2) foster honest and communal socio-ecological sensemaking, (3) be a self-defense mechanism, and (4) cultivate scientific identities and futures that transcend ecological ruin. Together, the findings advocate for a departure from dominant Cartesian and hetero-masculine logics that divorce reason from emotion, and instead honor and nurture Sentipensar as a conceptual tool and pedagogical approach for environmental and climate justice learning.

Significance. This work is an invitation to abandon the emotional stoicism and commitments to false objectivity that have come to dominate teaching about climate and environmental ruin (Author et al., 2012; Haraway, 1994; Rodríguez, 2022). And it offers a framework to support educators in understanding the varied ways youth wield their eco-emotions to engage in deeper sensemaking of the world around them, and in turn how to support them through challenging eco-emotions.

Author

• Kelsie Fowler, University of Washington