APRIL 2026

Dear Network Members,

We dedicate this month’s newsletter to exploring the intimate and often obscured role of emotions in human-environment relations.

In everyday life feelings and emotions that relate to ecologies, food, and agriculture seem ubiquitous. Agroecology as a politics and practice attempts to reshape our interdependent relationship with ecologies by attending to lived experiences that stem from sensing and feeling. Yet, these ways of knowing the world are not given much importance as political, social, and structural forces in academic literature on agroecology. This is despite a deep engagement with emotions and the body as sites of politics by feminists across disciplines and activist movements. 

With this newsletter we are highlighting work that explores the relationships between emotions and environmental relations, ranging from sensory engagement with land and soundscapes to the methodological challenges of studying emotions. In doing so we want to emphasise the central role feminist politics and perspectives have played in understanding what emotions do when entangled in agrarian relations. 

We hope you find the following resources useful and if we have missed anything important, feel free to let us know or share events, articles, ideas with the network directly.

Thanks as always and take care,

AgroFutures Team

Academic articles

Nichols, Carly E. (2026). Stressor Source as a New Dimension of Emotional Political Ecologies: The Case of Corn Belt Farm Stress in the United States. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 116(3):524–43. doi:10.1080/24694452.2025.2586038

Caretta, M. A., Ramasar, V., Zaragocin, S. & Torres, K. (2026). Cuerpo-territorio: Lessons learnt on a method to study embodied emotions. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 25(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069261418386 

Baker, Tagen Towsley, Claudia Radel, Liza Dale-Hallett, and Catherine Forge. (2021). ‘Photovoice, Claiming Visibility, and Women’s Farming Identities in Australia’. Emotion, Space and Society 41:100835. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100835.

Podcasts

Forest 404 is a groundbreaking radio play first launched in 2019 as part of the collaborative  Virtual Nature Project, in which academics sought to understand the psychological impacts of listening to sounds from nature. A dystopian environmental sci-fi starring Pearl Mackie, Tanya Moodie and Pippa Haywood, with theme music by Bonobo, the play explores the timely question “Can you feel loss for something you've never known?” 

In another episode of Threshold in Conversation: Climate Emotions with Audrey Martin, Amy discusses the role of Climate Cafes in the US, in sustaining resistance and coping amid climate breakdown.

Media

In Chile, La Via Campesina is denouncing the devastating fires in Biobío and Patagonia as a direct consequence of the "pyramidal" expansion of corporate forestry and extractive industries. These fires represent a localized front of global ecocide, where profit-driven monocultures have replaced the horizontal fabric of life-sustaining ecosystems. In response, peasant movements are rising to defend their territories, proving that the struggle for feminist agroecology is the only viable resistance against a model that sets our worlds on fire. More information here. 

Last year the Land Worker’s Alliance in the UK launched a new campaign: Hate out of Farming (HOOF), to tackle the rise of the far-right in farming: “As landworkers, we understand where monoculture gets us, and we know the importance of diversity; in our seeds, in our crops, in the fields and on the farmlands and including those who work them.”  You can read more about their strategy in their blog. 

Arts

If you are looking for some moving artistic inspiration about human-plant lifeworlds, you can check out Volume 2 of the newly established Plants and Poetry Journal, Rituals and Remedies: “An exploration of how we begin, endure, and end our days. Even in the most trying of times, humans find a way to fall madly in love, create beauty, and brace for impact. It’s a testament to the healing power of gathering over a meal, music, movement, prayer, rest, resistance, and yes, art.”

The Soils Museum of the Caribbean “believe in coexistence with living soils” and that  “knowing, feeling, and caring for our soils is of great importance.” They host online exhibitions, offer learning and research resources, run workshops and have established a Soil Heritage Project, where they are mapping soils in the archipelago of Puerto Rico.

Events

Call for contributions for a one-day panel discussion workshop: Feminist dialogues of hope and research | 18th June 2026 | School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

What does it mean to be hopeful? How can we have hope in practice?

We invite contributions to our full day panel discussion workshop that centres the theme of hope and research. Through a feminist dialogue on hope, the workshop attempts to reach beyond the ‘doom and gloom’ that characterise research experiences, narratives and imaginations, to think of alternative modes of attunement that are hopeful (Anderson, 2006; Gibson-Graham 2008). Cultivating hope can be a means of re-sensitistising and re-orienting researchers to the contributions their work can make for transformation and empowerment. Self-care can act as material and emotional replenishment for self-preservation that enables the attempts to care for and about collective troubles (see Lorde 1988). Yet, in enacting hopeful voices, the limits to such hopeful agencies must be contextualised within wider socio-political constraints (Berlant, 2011), posing us the important question: Who can have hope? How can hope(fulness) be enacted whilst inhabiting the negative (Ahmed, 2010)? How can one hang onto hope even in states of suspension or impasse? Thus, we also welcome contributions that critically engage with the tensions of remaining hopeful and the near impossibility of doing so. The significance of this workshop is thus positioned within the current socio-political climate of growing precarities that may disallow hope to emerge. Geographers and feminist scholars are concerned with the cost of losing hope (Coleman & Ferreday, 2010), and are acknowledging the challenges of (self-)care, replenishment and emotional well-being. Thus, we intend for the workshop to be a timely space where the activities and exchanges themselves act as a strategic way to cultivate mutual hopefulness and a wider academic culture that values hope.

Please send a 300-word abstract to Yi Fan Liu (yifan.liu@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Sieun Lee (sieun.lee@ouce.ox.ac.uk) by April 17, 2026, with your full contact details.