Creating Aesthetic Encounters of the World, or Teaching in the Presence of Climate Sorrow

This paper explores education as a context for facing what Susie Orbach has termed ‘climate sorrow’ and asks: what ‘relations to the world’ are we imagining might help youth stay with difficult feelings about the future by enabling them to develop a living relationship to the more‐than‐human world in the present? By way of response, the paper offers a conceptual shift from ‘relations to the world’ to ‘encounters of the world’. I draw on the work of David Abram to reframe our relations as sensory encounters and on the work of Bruno Latour to reframe the world as a living multiplicity. What both authors enable is a complex understanding of the temporality of our living in and with our environment. To explore this further, I offer a reading of Olafur Eliasson's climate artwork, Ice Watch . Consisting of 24 blocks of melting glacial ice outside the Tate Modern in London, the installation holds two temporal dimensions together through the kinds of encounters it makes possible: chronological time ( chronos ) and living time ( kairos ). In the final section , I locate the time of environmental teaching at the juncture of chronos and kairos as a way of creating encounters of the world that educate about the climate emergency while also giving time for climate sorrow.