Climate Festival 2026 - Mothers (or not) for Ecological Thinking
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
In this session, Dr Catherine Lord will focus on environmental mourning through the conceptual figure of the maternal, offering an original intervention at the intersection of ecological humanities, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory.
This addresses a notable gap in ecological and climate thinking: while loss, grief, and anxiety are increasingly discussed, the maternal has rarely been theorised as a structuring framework for understanding ecological damage, dependency, care, and responsibility. Drawing on literary and cinematic examples as well as psychoanalytic concepts, Dr Lord explores how environmental mourning might be understood not as a state to be resolved or overcome, but as an ongoing, relational condition, one that shapes ethical orientation, attachment, and forms of care in a damaged world.
Through this session, participants will:
- Be introduced to a new conceptual vocabulary for environmental mourning, grounded in psychoanalysis and feminist thought.
- Gain ways of thinking about climate grief that move beyond abstraction, urgency, or solutionism toward relational and ethical understanding.
- Encounter the maternal as a critical figure for rethinking care, dependency, vulnerability, and responsibility in ecological contexts.
- Leave with ideas that can inform research, teaching, creative practice, and climate communication, particularly where emotional, cultural, and ethical dimensions of ecological crisis are foregrounded.
Dr. Catherine Lord
Catherine is a writer, scholar and senior lecturer in literary and media studies, tenured at the department of Literature and Cultural Analysis, as well as Media Studies, at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in ecological humanities, literature and cinema. She studies the overlaps between psychoanalysis, feminism and the climate crisis. Her recent publications have appeared in Comparative American Studies, Green Letters and two Palgrave collections of essays. Currently, she is working on a book project about environmental mourning. She is also an artist, doing acting work in museal films. At present, she is developing practice-based projects which explore the intersection between psychoanalytic and ecological themes.
https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/l/o/c.m.lord/c.m.lord.html
Contact name: External Relations Events
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