“Relatives with Emotions”: Relationality, Responsibility, and Climate Change in a Maya Tzotzil Muslim Community

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

Abstract

Objective. This study examines how climate change science is taught, learned, and lived within an intergenerational Indigenous Maya Tzotzil Muslim community in Chiapas, Mexico. Focusing on three generations of women, we explore how emotions, relationality, and spiritual epistemologies shape the community’s sensemaking about climate change. We show how emotions serve as vital tools for collective sensemaking and action rooted in relational responsibility toward a more ecologically sustainable future.

Theoretical Framework. The study draws on decolonial, Indigenous, and relational theories of learning that center more-than-human kinship, intergenerational care, and embodied knowledge (Author, 2020; Author et al., 2023; Brayboy et al., 2012; Kimmerer, 2013). It positions emotion not as incidental to learning, but as a central epistemic and ethical force that shapes how climate change is understood and responded to (Norgaard & Reed, 2017; Wright, 2024; Wright et al., 2022). By challenging Western framings of science as emotionally neutral and human-centered, these paradigms invite deeper consideration of how historicized identities, values, and affective ties to more-than-human kin shape learners’ engagement with climate science.

Methods and Data. As part of a multi-year collaborative project with a Maya Tzotzil Muslim community in Chiapas, this research draws on ethnographic and design-based methods to document learning within an educational setting co-developed with community members. Over the course of our partnership, we witnessed the tangible impacts of climate on the community due to rising temperatures, drying rivers, and the gradual disappearance of plants vital to their diet and their Maya medicine. This paper focuses on the practices, activities, and interactions within this designed learning environment, as well as in intergenerational family conversations, to better understand how the community makes sense of climate change. We draw on observational field notes and videos of interactions to examine how emotions, such as grief, care, reverence, and gratitude, were expressed and mobilized as pedagogical practice, integral to climate science discourse and action.

Results. Our findings center on two key insights: (1) the community views land, water, animals, and other more-than-human entities not as resources but as relatives with emotions, intelligence, and agency, inviting a paradigm of science rooted in relationality rather than control and exploitation; (2) emotions are cultivated as pedagogical tools to cultivate and sustain commitments to environmental and intergenerational justice. Climate education, in this context, is not aimed solely at understanding change but at sustaining reciprocal, caring relationships with the Earth and with one another. Emotions are seen as drivers of both deep understanding and collective responsibility.

Significance. This research contributes to the field by theorizing emotion and relationality as inseparable from climate science learning within an Indigenous community in Chiapas. It responds directly to calls for better understanding how emotions, cultural identities, and historicity inform learners’ engagement in climate sensemaking and action. By illustrating how pedagogical practice can foster affective and relational forms of responsibility, this work helps reimagine science education as a site of healing, resistance, and collective transformation toward a more just, caring, and ecologically sustainable world.

Authors

• Lama Ziad Jaber, Florida State University

• Ayesha Khurshid, Florida State University

• Anairis de la Cruz Benito, Florida State University

• Melba Marin-Velasquez, Florida State University

• Katherine Murray Yaun, Florida State University