Cabello, Violeta and Barandiaran, Xabier and Gonzalez-Mon, Blanca and Zaragoza, Juan Manuel and Siqueiros, Jesús Mario and Brugnach, Marcela
(2026)
Socialecological affective arrangements: diving with a small sea of many seas.
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Abstract
Environmental change and ecosystem degradation engender deep affective experiences that shape governance agendas and sustainability transformations. However, environmental knowledge is frequently reduced to scientific facts, creating a ‘knowledge-action gap’ that overlooks emotional and affective ways of knowing. This paper explores how affects and emotions– understood as more than human relations– both shape and are shaped in socialecological phenomena. Drawing on relational accounts of affectivity by J. Slaby, which portray emotions as co-constitutive of sociomaterial niches rather than enclosed within individual minds, we advance the notion of Social-Ecological Affective Arrangement (SEAA) as a historically and geographically situated, heterogeneous formation of socialecological entities and practices mutually and recursively affecting-and-being-affected. We dive into this concept with the Mar Menor, the first legal person ecosystem in Europe, which has experienced a process of eutrophication over past decades. We develop an integrated qualitative and quantitative methodology to operationalize the concept into a mapping apparatus. This mapparatus extracts socialecological affective relational structures from qualitative interviews, which are then explored with network analysis tools. By analyzing interviews with diverse social actors, we illustrate how the lagoon’s eutrophication is experienced through a sea of interdependent SEAAs. Our results reveal how facts regarding ecological crises are inextricably entangled with childhood memories, professional practices, and emotional attachments, from sadness and grief to outrage and hope/lessness. We argue that the SEAA framework foregrounds affective experience as a crucial source of socialecological information and helps explain why people think-feel and narrate different worlds in every situated environmental issue.
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Socialecological affective arrangements: diving with a small sea of many seas. (deposited 17 Apr 2026 13:11)
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