Understanding transitions: Why emotions matter in shaping change

This is what Kristina Bogner, an assistant professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Utrecht University) grapples with as an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher focused on justice and emotions in transformative action. She argues that if we neglect emotions, we completely misunderstand how transitions occur in everyday life. The Deep Transitions Lab caught up with her to discuss why emotions matter in transitions and what led her to this field. 

“Emotions shape how we relate to people, situations, and our environment, and it’s through them that we create meaningful connections—with ourselves, with each other, and with the world around us,” says Bogner. “Even unpleasant emotions are first and foremost informative, they make us feel alive and drive us to take action.” For instance, she says “for me the idea of death is a motivation to live.”

The power of emotions in transitions 

According to Bogner, the lack of engagement with emotions in transitions research reflects a broader trend in Western academia: the artificial separation of thinking from feeling, cognition from emotion. This upholds the ideal of the ‘rational’—seen as controllable—while portraying the ‘emotional’ as unpredictable and disorderly. Interestingly, this separation also helps keep certain power structures intact by using emotions to discredit certain ways of doing, thinking and behaving. Bogner explains that labelling particular perspectives as ‘emotional’ serves as a political tool—one that reinforces power dynamics by controlling dominant narratives and maintaining societal divisions. A clear example is the dismissal of calls for fair taxation as mere ‘jealousy debates'.

Drawing from varied literatures*, Bogner highlights the deep connections between emotions, power, powerlessness, justice perception, and transformative action. “We know emotions can hinder transformative action because they can support oppressive power structures. But there's also work—like that on female rage—showing that emotions can serve as the micro foundations for change.” 

Understanding the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands

Together with two colleagues, Bogner is currently analysing discourses surrounding the nitrogen crisis in theNetherlands. Witnessing the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands prompted her to discover the lack of writing on emotions in transitions. The team is conducting a large-scale analysis of 20,000 articles using topic modelling, sentiment analysis and text mining to understand how the topic is being emotionally framed in the media and the kinds and strengths of emotions the articles try to elicit. 

“Certain groups in society—like people on social media, journalists and also politicians—are highly skilled at understanding and leveraging emotions,” she explains. “By educating ourselves and becoming emotions-literate, we can better assess, get a better ‘feeling’ of what’s happening in and around us—helping to prevent political radicalisation and avoid the traps of populism.”

Emotions are an opportunity for transformation   

“In Western societies, we’ve not only destroyed large parts of the world's ecosystems, but substantial proportions of the population face severe loneliness. In exploiting others and nature, we are also destroying ourselves. We’re clinging to a false sense of security and control.” Bogner explains that this mindset leaves Western societies rigid and ill-equipped to deal with the reality of climate change. To move forward, she argues, we need to let go of certain practices that are deeply embedded in our societies and culture—like overconsumption and the need for felt control at all costs.

She also points to the tendency in Western societies to avoid unpleasant emotions, striving instead for comfort. “Instead of eliminating them, I want to help people make space for these unpleasant emotions. They are important to be felt, a natural part of life and can help trigger processes of unlearning, re-learning and deep transformative change.”

Unlearning allows for a different way to engage with the world 

Unlearning is about actively letting go. Bogner explains that overtime, humans create patterns of reactions that we revert to in times of stress.“We find it hard to release the cultural structures and ideas we’ve long held, even when we realise they are harmful—whether it’s racism, sexism, colonial thinking, or, for me I notice, internalised capitalism. These deeply ingrained belief systems are strong and have shaped how we think and feel.”  

By allowing ourselves to let go, we open up to new and different ways of engaging with the world. “Only through unlearning can our societies develop in ways that are more sustainable and just.” 

Using critical emotional awareness to cope with transition pain 

So what insights can Bogner bring from her research so far? To cope with the pain and difficult emotions that will accompany transitions to sustainability, she advocates for developing competencies in critical emotional awareness to engage with emotional responses to injustices to feel the need to change.

1.    Move from safe to brave spaces. Brave spaces enable us to experience uncomfortable truths. These spaces are needed to create change.

2.    Unlearning spaces as spaces for second-order learning. By unlearning you actively must confront and let go of held belief systems.

3.    Learning to ‘live-with’ transformative change. We have to live with messiness, discomfort and the inability to control. The world we used to live in does not exist anymore—so we need to let go of certainty.

Returning to our initial question: how can a deeper understanding of emotion help us better comprehend and govern the dynamics of transitions? While transitions are complex processes unfolding across multiple socio-technical systems, they also manifest as changes to our everyday lives. As Bogner notes, “We can’t stop change happening, transformation will happen – by design or by disaster. But we can change how we position towards change, how we feel about it. And how feelings in and about change can help us shape it.

By understanding emotion, we become better equipped to cope with change, and shape its speed and direction. Emotions are powerful tools for uniting communities to challenge dominant power structures”. 

* Bogner explicitly acknowledges and thanks others for their seminal contributions to theorising and working with emotions, which have very much shaped her work. She builds on the work of other thinkers and doers, including but not limited to Sara Ahmed, Blanche Verlie, Joanna Macy, bell hooks, Maren Urner, Maria Ojala, Erika Summers-Effler. The particular concepts referred to in this article are brought to Kristina by colleagues such as Guiseppe Feola (unlearning and unmaking), Maria Ojala (critical emotional awareness), Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens (brave spaces) and Blanche Verlie (‘living-with’). She also learned tremendously from her grandmother, sister and female friends.

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