As the devastating realities of anthropogenic climate change escalate, the global environmental crisis is increasingly recognised not only as an ecological emergency but also as a psychological and existential threat. Over the past few years, the human dimensions of this crisis have gained public attention, with terms such as ‘climate anxiety’ and ‘ecological grief’ emerging as mainstream cultural buzzwords and subjects of intensive academic inquiry to capture the emotional toll of a warming world. Against this backdrop, this thesis investigates how ecological distress is discursively constructed, performed, and contested across interpersonal, public, and digital communicative spheres, and examines the broader social and political implications of these constructions. Grounded in critical discursive psychology and environmental psychology, the research challenges mainstream psychological paradigms that tend to isolate and quantify climate anxiety as an individualised discrete emotion. Instead, through a multi-sited qualitative design, the project approaches eco-emotions as flexible, socially negotiated affective-discursive practices used to navigate moral responsibilities, societal expectations, and political agency in the face of the climate crisis.
The first study (Paper I) explores the interpersonal negotiation of ecological distress through 18 focus group discussions with 93 young people in Norway. The analysis identifies three primary affective dilemmas constructed by youth: viewing climate anxiety as a voluntary versus involuntary state, experiencing fear as a motivation versus a barrier to action, and balancing the responsibility for climate action with the need for individualised self-care. To manage these tensions, young people engage in affective-discursive practices such as purposeful engagement, detachment, and striving to stay positive. The results illustrate how broader ideological imperatives of affective management often burden youth with navigating systemic ecological crises through personal emotional regulation.
Scaling up to the national public sphere, the second study (Paper II) examines the construction of climate anxiety in Norwegian news media through a discursive analysis of 125 articles published between 2017 and 2024. The analysis reveals three competing storylines of emotion that serve distinct political functions. The ‘moral compass’ storyline validates distress as a rational catalyst for collective action, while the ‘avoidable pathology’ storyline delegitimises climate engagement by framing distress as an unhealthy reaction to media alarmism. A third storyline, the ‘individualising distraction’, critiques both, arguing that an overemphasis on individual psychological states depoliticises the climate debate and distracts from urgent structural change.
Finally, the third study follows eco-anxiety to its dissemination in global digital networks (Paper III), employing digital ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis to investigate visual representations of #EcoAnxiety on Instagram. The study highlights the tension between the platform’s grammars, which afford the promotion of curated aesthetics, wellness-culture, and sometimes toxic positivity against the backdrop of the ecological crisis. The results demonstrate how users both reproduce neoliberal self-care imperatives and subvert them through visual interpretative repertoires of dark humour, irony, and satire, creating spaces for emotional honesty and solidarity that challenge dominant, individualising emotion management scripts.
Together, these three studies contribute to the denaturalisation of ‘eco-anxiety’ by demonstrating how the cross-pollination of psy-terminologies take different shapes across communicative spheres offering certain ways for how people understand themselves, normative feeling rules, and their political agency. The research challenges the dichotomies often drawn between therapeutic self-care and political activism, illustrating instead how psychological vocabularies can be continuously repurposed—both to individualise systemic grievances and to reclaim democratic agency. Ultimately, this thesis illustrates that ecological distress is not a pre-discursive state that inherently dictates either paralysis or collective action; rather, it is a continuous site of social negotiation. By recognising how the language we use to describe our feelings opens and closes distinct possibilities for action, we can better understand the complex ways in which individuals and societies navigate their responses to an increasingly unstable climate.