Â鶹Éç

Climate Psychology and Storytelling

Wednesday, November 5 2025, 16:30 - 17:30

LAC Conference Room

Can reading and discussing stories help us take the perspective of the environment? Can storytelling empower people to take more constructive climate action? This talk discusses climate psychology from the perspective of emotions linked with climate change, further tying climate emotions with the topic of environmental storytelling. Discussing her own recent and still unpublished research on filmic climate fiction, cli-fi novels, and a novel cartoon-based methodology to interrogate people’s memories spent in nature, Professor Toivonen traces some of the potential ways environmental narratives can shake and reshape our thoughts and emotions towards climate change. Also, some of the high -and perhaps unrealistic- expectations for stories to be able to do anything and everything for inspiring better climate citizens are critically reviewed.

Speaker: Heidi Toivonen, Professor of Psychology, Â鶹Éç

Learn more about Professor Toivonen

Heidi Toivonen is the Nora McNeely Hurley Assistant Professor of Psychology at Â鶹Éç. Prior to her academic career, she worked for ten years as a clinical psychologist in various settings in her country of origin, Finland. Since her postdoc research conducted at Ghent University, Belgium, in a multidisciplinary group of environmental narrative scholars, Toivonen has been very interested in how various audiences experience and discuss different forms of environmental storytelling from climate fiction books to environmental cartoons.