Unfeeling the climate crisis: Disaffection and the politics of intensity

Abstract
Being bored by talk of glacier loss, resigned to climate change impacts, numb to yet another graph – these and other ways of feeling little or faintly about climate change sit uneasily with claims of present planetary crisis and future catastrophe. In this paper, I argue for the importance of ‘disaffected feelings’ to understanding how climate change is experienced and how climate-related (in)action happens. Disaffected feelings have been backgrounded in research on climate emotions, feelings, and affects, with work orientating to how subjects are intensely and negatively affected by the climate crisis. Drawing out how disaffection is absent-present in this research and work on climate change denial, I centre the ambivalence of disaffected feelings – how little or faint feeling performs different relations with climate change. After establishing the importance of disaffection for the politics of climate change and drawing on empirical work, I raise four issues for discussion: how disaffection makes climate change present; what being disaffected does for subjects; what else is detached from when little or nothing is felt about climate change, and how disaffection is governed/governed through. I conclude by arguing that disaffection shows the importance of questions of intensity for the politics of climate change. 

Bio
Ben Anderson is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. He has published extensively on affective life as articulated with politics, as well as how futures are governed amid uncertainty. He is co- author (with Prof. Anna Secor) of The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2025) and Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Routledge, 2014). As well as theoretical work on conjunctural analysis and attachment and detachment as (non) relations, his current research focuses on the politics of intensity in right-wing populism and on climate change disaffection. He is currently writing a book on the politics of boredom. Beyond his own research, he is one of the editors of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and previously edited The Geographical Journal.   

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