Дисертації з теми "Ecologites"

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have proven to work effectively in practice, but still suffer from a lack of power and expressiveness: simple tasks are often laborious to carry out with a mouse, there is never enough display space available to make commands easy to reach, and customization and tailoring are difficult to accomplish. In this thesis we propose to overcome these limitations by reimagining graphical user interfaces. The aim is to preserve all established benefits of existing GUIs while seamlessly integrating novel forms of interaction. Our contribution consist of three case studies: The first case study is concerned with physical pen-and-paper customization of GUIs on large interactive surfaces. We introduce two novel techniques: the live sketching of free-form controls, and the configuration of new controls via handwritten annotations. The results of our studies show: handwritten annotations are more efficient for configuring physical interfaces than list-based configuration; free-form sketched controls can be created effectively, and be used as efficiently by users as tangible controls and keyboard interfaces. The second case study explores two-handed interaction with touchpad and mouse on notebooks - a configuration that we show commonly exists in practice. We introduce a series of novel interaction techniques that utilize the touchpad as independent input device alongside the mouse. The results of our studies show: using the touchpad for document navigation with the non-dominant hand is instantly be as efficient as conventional methods, and show potential to improve with more practice; flick-gestures and inertia introduce navigation overhead; absolute mappings are initially less efficient but show steeper learning curves and adding a metallic token can decrease jumps, but produces more overshoots. The third case study revolves around keyboards that are extended with touch-sensing and display capability, allowing them to seamlessly blend with the graphical input and output space surrounding them. We introduce a series of novel interaction techniques that push the boundaries of conventional mouse-keyboard-display configurations. The results of our studies show: using display enabled keyboards, users can instantly invoke commands faster than with the mouse or conventional keyboards; touch-enabled keyboards can enforce the tactile acquisition of hotkeys, allowing users to rest their hands and focus on the primary screen. We conclude by envisioning a GUI ecology that seamlessly integrates the interaction space from all three case studies.

This project is driven by omissions at the intersection of ecological game studies and media-ecology. Although authors have studied videogames from a variety of ecological approaches, few have attempted to develop a holistic methodology, embracing videogames' specific attributes while recognising their role within larger physical systems. This thesis is an attempt to address this, reading videogames as simultaneously about and functioning as ecologies. My methodology draws on the agential-realist philosophy of Karen Barad whose theory of 'intra-activity' is abundant with ecological ramifications. Adapting Barad's 'intra-active' framework for use with contemporary videogames, I read them as assemblages of hardware, software and their human players. I explore three significant aspects of game studies: interaction, aesthetics and affect. Focusing on interaction, I analyse the game Shelter. Emphasising the role of hardware and software, I read these processes in conjunction with an understanding of gameplay. This encourages a shift away from seeing gameplay as 'interaction' as it is defined within human-computer-interaction, and instead promotes a view that is 'intra-active'. Siding with Barad, play is radically reframed as a phenomenon that produces the apparent objects of its inception. In the second study I approach a series of more experimental games illustrating how an agential-realist worldview influences aesthetics. Analysing high-concept puzzle games Superhot, Antichamber, and Manifold Garden, I suggest that these games place a focus on aspects of ecology often over-shadowed in so-called 'natural' imaginings of our world, such as time, space and their entanglement. Finally, bringing my focus to the role of the player in my ecological understanding of games I analyse a number of short, human-centred or biographical games. Seeing the role of the player in an ecological manner, designers deviate from traditional methods of generating pathos and affect. Rather than developing empathetic relationships between player and avatar through immersion, viewing the player as only a part of an ecological system demands a posthuman response from players. These designers ask players to empathise while acknowledging their role is small and not central. This thesis presents a novel point of view that draws attention to the ambitious design practices of artists while suggesting new avenues in the future.

This thesis describes the work to make a portable ubiquitous device into a component in a networked robotic environment. The device can both control and be controlled in a robotic network as well as used to survey a robotic network. This is done by building upon existing software for making networked robotic components and use it on devices with the Android operating system. The software is the PEIS-kernel (Physically Embedded Intelligent System) middleware. The middleware makes it possible to build robotic components called PEIScomponents that can communicate, work together and share their resources and capabilities. The result of this work is three-fold, first a way to make devices with the Android operating system into PEIS-devices so that they can be used to control or be controlled as well as survey a PEIS-network.With this the Android device functionality can be used to extend the capabilities of an entire PEIS-network. Secondly, devices with Android get access to a simple and powerful way to exchange information with any device that is a PEIS-device. The third contribution is the capability to make humans a much more integral part of a PEIS-network as devices with Android are in general easy to use and familiar to humans. These devices will serve as a very good human - PEIS-network interaction tool.

Animals have occupied a prominent position in geographical research for some time (Philo and Wilbert 2000, Wolch and Emel, 1998) and the importance of animals in personal narratives of identity, place and space is widely accepted (see for example Matless et al., 2005). However, such research is predominantly focussed on understandings of mammals. This thesis contests this dominance by critically investigating the significance of fish in shaping understandings of animals. The work also connects with the burgeoning geographical interest with water (see for example, Gandy, 2002; Swyngedouw, 2004; Gandy, 2004, Kaika, 2005; and Braun 2005) but through an approach which steps away from understandings of water as just a resource to recognise that it is a resource that connects different issues, scales and approaches and has a materiality that shapes, and influences understandings of people and places. It also contributes to debates surrounding nature/society as it examines the interactions between humans and non-mammalian animals to interrogate issues relating to escape, wildness, nostalgia and connects large scale ‘landscape’ approaches to close-up encounters with the more-than-human world. These connections flow from the connectivity generated through water as it connects ‘diffuse’ issues into particular organisms. This connectivity has been exploited as fish are used as indicator species for public policy. Alongside this use as indicator species, fisheries management is usually science driven. Therefore running through the thesis is a critique of the role of the natural sciences and economics in shaping understandings fish as the political ecology of which fish, in which locations, are made to count. All this was achieved through a methodology that encouraged anglers to address the complexities, inconsistencies and tensions within their angling experience.

The current proliferation of connected displays and mobile devices from smart phones and tablets to wall-sized displays presents a number of exciting opportunities for information visualization and visual analytics. When a user employs heterogeneous displays collaboratively to achieve a goal, they form what is known as a display ecology. The display ecology enables multiple displays to function in concert within a broader technological environment to accomplish tasks and goals. However, since information and tasks are scattered and disconnected among separate displays, one of the inherent challenges associated with visual analysis in display ecologies is enabling users to seamlessly coordinate and subsequently connect and integrate information across displays. This research primarily addresses these challenges through the creation of interaction and visualization techniques and systems for display ecologies in order to support sensemaking with visual analysis. This dissertation explores essential visual analysis activities and design considerations for visual analysis in order to inform the new design of display ecologies for visual analysis. Based on identified design considerations, we then designed and developed two visual analysis systems. First, VisPorter supports intuitive gesture interactions for sharing and integrating information in a display ecology. Second, the Spatially Aware Visual Links (SAViL) presents a cross-display visual link technique capable of guiding the user's attention to relevant information across displays. It also enables the user to visually connect related information over displays in order to facilitate synthesizing information scattered over separate displays and devices. The various aspects associated with the techniques described herein help users to transform and empower the multiple displays in a display ecology for enhanced visual analysis and sensemaking.
Ph. D.

As the use of mobile technologies, consumer electronics and the internet expand, there are more opportunities for young visual designers around the world to gain access to design industries. Yet differences in infrastructure and spatial configurations create distinct obstacles and opportunities for emerging designers from marginal contexts, as often these infrastructures are not designed with them in mind. Employing a practice perspective, which brings together concerns around identity and infrastructure, I used ethnographic and exploratory methods to understand the creative practices of a group of young, resource-constrained, aspiring creatives from Cape Town, South Africa, who are enrolled in design courses. This thesis explores tensions between authentic creativity and continuity, as well as notions of democratization in visual design practices. Off campus, young people predominantly appropriated mobile devices as infrastructure for creative practices. They used data frugally, grabbed media in patches and snippets, and used multiple free applications together to forge creative work, participation and distributions. These practices, which include mobile-based photography, design and branding, were situated in particular creative worlds, which revolved around distinctive visual styles. Instead of vast networks with flows of data that connect infinite nodes, these creatives experienced the web and digital media as an assemblage of technologies and tariffs for mobile data. Thus, these media-related practices were more ‘patchworked’ than networked. Once enrolled in design courses, a very different repertoire of protocols, standards, materials, technologies, concepts and ways of being became infrastructural to these young people’s participation in formal visual design practices. For many participants, an enduring distance separated them from those embodied, technical and spatial requirements for later professional participation in the design industries. These tensions demonstrated how very particular configurations of resources are infrastructural to visual design practice associated with formal industries. Infrastructure and practice are thus dynamically and asymmetrically mutually constituted. This thesis employs improvisational jamming to make the role of infrastructure visible, along with specific mobile design practices. Many of these mobile systems were standardized and encoded with cultural norms, giving creatives second-hand discourses from which to build their own creative artefacts. These case studies draw attention to the global standardization of infrastructures for creative practice, which threatens to flatten the cultural richness of local creative voices.

This practice-based thesis aims to inform new kinds of creative art and design practice that are engaged with the production and critique of new technological artefacts and systems. The core focus of this research is the role of materiality in making-processes as part of an ecology of technological experience, in other words an 'experiential ecology'. Building on an existing, ontological argument that meaning is an a priori property of being, a proposition for materiality's intrinsic historicity is developed. It is argued that material things have meaning, anterior to interpretation, and that consequently meaning is connected to objects' pasts. It is then described how a principal implication of this understanding in the context of making with contemporary technologies is the adoption of an 'archaeological' approach to studying and producing artefacts which engages with such pre-existing meanings. It is suggested that a possible consequence of this archaeological engagement, for practitioners, is that they view their making activities as situated within ecologies of existing agencies and interactions of the material world into which practice intervenes. Building on Dewey's articulation of the connection of aesthetics to the circumstances of art's production aesthetic experience within such ecologies integrates the activity of making to the material histories of artefacts. To inform making-practices thus conceived, a framework of five separate facets of materiality is developed: performative, distributed, spatio, temporal, fragile, and future-oriented. This framework is applied through a case study describing the making-process of a new artwork entitled 'Neurotic Armageddon Indicator'. The results of this application are examined to assess their contribution to the earlier introduced experiential ecology. This practice-based research makes the following contributions: (i) a design framework that defines five facets of materiality and suggested applications and benefits, (ii) a series of experimental artworks that articulate and develop that framework and (iii) an articulation of experiential ecologies that offers ways for designers and artists to contextualise their production as part of a vibrant material world.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture; and, (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-53).
"For the past fifty years the question of nature has been conspicuously absent from urbanistic discourse... The development of the American city can be explained through the opposition between nature and culture, wilderness and city."-- Diana Agrest, 1996. From the Greek for study of the house, ecology refers to the relationships (or the study thereof) between organisms and their physical environment. As a field of study, ecology is relatively young, one that initially concentrated on descriptive research attempting to understand the processes of "natural" systems absent human intervention. Only recently have ecologists begun to argue for the understanding of the urban environment as participating in these processes. At issue in this debate is how one perceives the role of humans. The historical Western division between "nature" and "culture" is still operative; for many, the very definition of nature is that which is non-human. This thesis is an attempt to move beyond that division by forging an understanding of the city as a set of interlaced ecologies, including the biotic (animal, plants, microorganisms), the abiotic (water, wind, sun, soil), the sociocultural (social networks, psychogeography), the political (land uses, wards, school districts), and the economic (land value, capital flows), among others. Through an understanding that places humans and human settlement directly in nature, a new mode of urban intervention may becomes viable. The goal of this thesis is to explore and develop new models for understanding the ecological city, models that will enable new modes of urban intervention.
by Christine Cerqueira Gaspar.
M.C.P.
M.Arch.

Les risques ecologiques majeurs, accidents de grande ampleur, rares mais probables, lies a certains types d'activites industrielles utilisant des substances chimiques ou toxiques ont des effets destructeurs immediats sur l'homme et la nature et des effets differes dans le temps et l'espace difficilement evaluables. Le recours a la faute et au lien de causalite pour etablir la responsabilite a eteabandonne au profit d'une responsabilite de plein droit. L'indemnisation rencontre des difficultes dans l'evaluation des dommages ainsi que dans l'identification des victimes. Certaines ne seront atteintes que des annees apres l'evenement initiateur. De plus, comment prendre en compte la nature? des fonds d'indemnisation aides par le developpement de systemes d'assurance en la matiere ont ete misen place. L'indemnisation ne constitue pas l'unique reponse a ce type d'evenement qui bouscule le sentiment de securite de populations entieres. Les devoirs d'informations et de controle des etats ont un role croissant en droit international. Au niveau national, l'etat a trouve un equilibre entre les interets des industries a risque et le desir de securite des individus par la mise en oeuvre de principes economiques et de mesures de securite. C'est egalement au niveau individuel que des moyens d'action sont envisageables. Les actions en justice des associations ou des groupements de personnes en france et aux etatsunis s'imposent. Le regroupement des actions est necessaire. L'acces et la comprehension de l'information et la participation des citoyens a l'elaboration des textes regissant ces risques et leur developpement meritent, peut-etre en s'inspirant du modele nord-americain, d'etre ameliores. De cette facon, les citoyens, qui tirent une satisfaction et des bienfaits de l'existence de ces activites a risques, ne seront par reduits a l'etat de victime.

A lo largo y ancho del mundo, los conflictos ambientales invaden nuevas geografías y espacios simbólicos. Este proceso se ha llamado la “ambientalización” de las luchas sociales, y consiste en el uso de los problemas ecológicos para ganar legitimidad y así desafiar tanto a las estructuras como a prácticas políticas y científicas. Esta tesis busca examinar los motivos, energías y estrategias de resistencia a la desposesión ambiental considerando sus propias formas de expresión, los valores expresados y el significado que yo otorgo. En este sentido, primero examino lugares específicos de resistencia y luego a través de análisis y comparaciones de múltiples casos amplío el alcance del estudio. Finalmente, presento un marco comparativo de la estadística en la ecología política que busca integrar el conocimiento activista con información social y biofísica. La tesis comienza con algunas preguntas generales: (i) ¿Cómo se expresan estos conflictos?; (ii) ¿Cuáles políticas utilizan estos grupos? (iii) ¿Con qué finalidad?. Luego, refino estas preguntas en cinco sub-preguntas de investigación: (a) ¿bajo qué condiciones emerge una resistencia efectiva contra la frontera de las mercancías?; (b) ¿cuál es la política o políticas del conocimiento utilizadas por dichos movimientos?; (c) ¿cómo podemos entender el proceso por el cual estos movimientos escogen sus estrategias y tácticas para defender sus reivindicaciones?; (d) ¿cuales son las inter-relaciones de grupos movilizados a diferentes escalas?; (e) ¿como puede utilizarse un análisis desde la economía ecológica/ecología política para apoyar estas luchas?. Para examinar estas preguntas me vuelco en concretos y teorías sobre: conflictos ambientales, formas de ambientalismo, acumulación por desposesión, metabolismo social, política de los conocimientos activistas y teoría de los movimientos sociales para analizar cómo los grupos en estos contextos tan diferentes desafían a los desbalances de poder, cómo consiguen ganar poder, y cómo estos grupos obtienen sus objetivos y resultan exitosos en su resistencia a proyectos impuestos. Finalmente, estoy interesada en el rol del activismo en la construcción de una agenda transformadora más amplia que se pregunte y desafíe las (super) estructuras políticas e institucionales. Concluyo esta tesis iluminando las luchas por conflictos ambientales y sus análisis al enfocarme en las siguientes cinco lecciones: 1) Establecer precios de la naturaleza no contribuye a la conservacion ni a la justicia ambiental porque el proceso técnico y político para definir precios profundiza y reproduce las iniquidades estructurales con consecuencias negativas a nivel distributivo; 2) La prohibición a la participación de diferentes actores sociales puede catalizar nuevas formas de democracia participativa en el territorio y la coproduccion de conocimiento tecnico “situado”; 3) La reasignación de los derechos a la productividad biológica y la incorporación de actores en nuevas estructuras agrarias transforma no sólo las relaciones sociales y las estrategias de acumulación sino también reproduce a la naturaleza influyendo en gran medida en la energética de los ecosistemas y por ende en las estrategias de vida de las poblaciones; 4) Los movimientos locales han conseguido sus máximos logros al ser capaces de unir en amplias coaliciones a grupos con agendas complejas y multidimensionales. Los discursos ambientalistas son utilizados como estrategias “apolíticas” clave por grupos a diferentes escalas mientras que la política de identidad puede ser una herramienta poderosa para la movilización pero puede conducir a la atomización que puede confluir en conflictos locales étnicos. 5) Existe la necesidad de desarrollar nuevos métodos que analicen los aspectos globales e interconectados de los luchas ambientales locales, para así trascender de las escalas locales y conseguir entender los procesos y relaciones que generan las iniquidades ambientales a escalas más amplias como regional, nacional y globales. Ofrezco este esquema dentro de esta nueva praxis para la investigación en justicia ambiental. Finalmente, en mi tesis presento el concepto del ambientalismo de los desposeídos para así explicar las motivaciones de los movimientos ambientales en el presente. Las características que definen al ambientalismo de los desposeídos incluyen un uso de la política como desafío al poder del estado basado en una crítica estructural a la acumulación capitalista. El ambiente se concibe como co-producido y dependiente más que como la “naturaleza” en singular. Asimismo, el ambientalismo de los desposeídos está informado por una conciencia planetaria que describe a los procesos locales como embuídos en flujos socio-metabólicos globales a través de las cadenas de mercancía, y finalmente, el ambientalismo de los desposeídos utiliza de manera activa tácticas de disrupción muchas veces contenciosas para responder a esta desposesión ecológica. Palabras clave: justicia ambiental, ecología política, metabolismo social, investigación colaborativo, contención, conocimiento activista, acumulación por despojo, política agraria, capitalismo, crisis, "commodity chains"
Around the world environmental conflicts are invading new spatial and symbolic spaces. This process has been described as the “environmentalization” of social struggles, whereby ecological issues are increasingly used to both legitimate and contest political and scientific structures and practices. This dissertation responds to the need to examine the motives and strategies of resistance to environmental dispossession, considering the forms they take, the values they express and the meanings we can ascribe to them. I do so firstly by examining specific sites of resistance and then broadening out through multi-case analysis. Finally I introduce a framework for a cross-comparative “statistical political ecology” that aims to integrate activist knowledge with social and biophysical data. I start by asking the overarching questions: (i) How are such conflicts expressing themselves? (ii) What are the politics such groups are employing? (iii) and to what effect? I then refine these into five sub-research questions (a) under which conditions does effective resistance against a commodity resource frontier emerge? (b) What are the politics of knowledge employed by such movements? (c) How can we understand how they pick their strategies and tactics to stake their claims? (d) What are the inter-connections of groups mobilizing across scales? (e) And how can a political ecological/ecological economics analysis be put to use to support such struggles? To examine these questions, I engage with concepts from ecological conflicts, forms of environmentalism, accumulation by dispossession, social metabolism, politics of activist knowledge and social movement theory to analyze how groups in different contexts contest power imbalances, leverage power, and how they achieve their goals and become successful in both rolling back imposed projects. Finally I am interested in the role of such activism in wider transformative agendas that can challenge broader political and institutional structures. I conclude this dissertation by bringing light to environmental conflict struggles and analyses focusing on the following five lessons: 1. Setting prices for nature is neither conducive to conservation nor to environmental justice because the technical and political process of setting prices deepens and reproduces structural inequalities with negative distributive effects; 2. The foreclosing of participation for different social actors is catalyzing new forms of participatory democracy and the co-production of “situated” technical knowledge; 3. The re-assignation of rights to biological productivity and the incorporation of actors into new agrarian structures transforms not only social relations and accumulation strategies, but also reproduces nature with profound impacts on ecosystem energetics and corresponding livelihood strategies. 4. Local movements have achieved the most success when they have been able to unite broad coalitions of groups with complex and multidimensional agendas. Environmentalist discourses are deployed as a key “apolitical” strategy by groups across scales while identity politics are both a powerful tool for mobilization as well as a divisive force that can lead to local ethnic conflict. 5. There is a need to develop new methods for analyzing the global and inter-linked aspects of localized environmental struggles, that allows going beyond dynamics at local scales to understand crucial processes and relations generating environmental inequalities at broader regional, national, and global scales. I offer such a framework within a new praxis for environmental justice research. Finally, I offer the concept of the environmentalism of the dispossessed to explain the motivations of environmental movements today. It’s defining characteristics include: the use of politics to challenge state power based on a structural critique of capitalist accumulation; a conception of the environment as being co-produced and contingent rather than being conceived a singular “nature”; informed by a “global materialism” that considers how local processes are embedded with global social metabolic flows through commodity chains; and increasingly willing to use disruptive and contentious tactics to respond to ecological dispossession. Keywords: environmental justice, political ecology, ecological conflicts, social metabolism, collaborative research, contention, activist knowledge, accumulation by dispossession, agrarian politics, capitalism, crisis, commodity chains

In this thesis I offer a philosophy and a performance practice of the ear. It is a theoretical reflection as well as a discussion on my hearing/listening and performance practice, research and workshops. Here is where sound and the body move and perform by relating to the constantly changing acoustic environment. It is an enquiry into and a corporeal experience of sound as the ear body, a bodied experience of sound and listening where the whole body becomes an ear. This is explored through my experience of chronic tinnitus, a criticism of over-determined technology and through a discussion on the trance-dance therapy of Tarantism. With a focus on environmental awareness, this thesis is an ecophenomenological investigation in my theory of site contingency, where I connect my ecophenomenological approach to contingency – contingency intended as a necessary experience of the world – and to acoustic ecology. It offers a methodology for performance-making, also through workshops. They are a ground for shared mutual experience and contribution, with participants from different backgrounds and abilities, and are also a pedagogical instrument, for students and others, in the form of a ‘training’ practice of the ear. This methodology becomes a basis for what I call site-contingent performance, where sound is intended and experienced as relation and as contingency. The kinaesthetics of sound is exemplified in ‘aural choreography,’ a moving by following environmental sounds, and where the experience of contingency is also in the practice of ‘earlines’ drawing; a form of performance and of acoustic documentation.

This thesis explores the relationship between water infrastructure, ecological change, and the politics of planning in New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta, USA. Complex assemblages of water control infrastructure have been embedded in the delta over the last several centuries in an effort to keep its cities protected from floodwaters and maintain its waterways as standardized conduits for maritime transportation. This thesis investigates the historical development of these infrastructural interventions in the delta’s dynamics, and shows how the region’s eco-hydrology is ensnared in the politics and materiality of pipes, pumps, canals, locks, and levees. These historical entanglements complicate contemporary efforts to enact large-scale ecosystem restoration, even while the delta’s landscape is rapidly eroding into the sea. This historical approach is extended into the present through an examination of how waterway standards established at so-called chokepoints in the global maritime transportation system (the Panama Canal, for example) become embedded and contested in coastal landscapes and port cities worldwide. Turning towards urban ecology, the thesis examines socioecological responses to the flooding following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with a special focus on how infrastructure failures, flooding intensity, and land abandonment are driving changing vegetation patterns in New Orleans over the past decade. The thesis contributes new conceptual language for grappling with the systemic relations bound up in water infrastructure, and develops one of the first studies describing urban ecosystem responses to prolonged flooding and post-disaster land management. This provides insights into the impending planning challenges facing New Orleans and coastal cities globally, where rising sea levels are bringing about renewed attention to how infrastructure is implicated in patterns of ecological change, hazard exposure, resilience, and social inequality.

At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Accepted. Paper 5: Manuscript.

Master of Landscape Architecture
Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning
Lee R. Skabelund
Throughout the history of Kansas City, the Brush Creek Corridor has experienced severe flooding which, on numerous occasions, has resulted in loss of life. This urban stream supports a high profile area of the city. It is located adjacent to what is considered Kansas City’s most elite shopping district, the JC Nichols Country Club Plaza, the University of Missouri - Kansas City urban campus, as well as numerous high density residential units. The stream corridor has been confined due to the encroachment of the surrounding urban environment which has minimized many opportunities for the future management of Brush Creek. There have been many flood control projects but these solutions have not been effective in reducing along the entire corridor. Previous projects have been done in a way that alienates urban dwellers from Brush Creek and does not allow pedestrians to utilize the stream corridor as an effective urban green space. The Brush Creek Corridor can be redesigned to revitalize the existing area by embracing natural ecological processes in order to create a more sustainable urban stream system. Brush Creek can be envisioned in a way that will enhance visitor experience by exposing and revealing the ecological processes to the users without inhibiting the functionality of those natural processes. Four project goals have been identified through research: improve, connect, and educate. In order to achieve the project goals, a set of sites are to be selected from the corridor. A corridor study is done to identify sites by assessing factors related to the site’s ability to improve, connect, and educate. Once the sites have been identified and defined, programming and site design strategies will be implemented to relate to the project goals. The selected sites within the Brush Creek Corridor will be models for experience oriented urban stream design. The project area will harbor healthy ecosystems with integrated pedestrian oriented spaces that connect the corridor, improve environmental conditions, and support environmental education. These projects will be catalysts for experience oriented ecological design solutions throughout the Brush Creek Corridor in the future.

As technology progresses, we become surrounded with an ever increasing number of devices. Information can now be persistently represented beyond a single screen and a single session. In the educational context, we see a rapid adoption of the panoply of devices, but often without any careful thought. Devices in isolation are unlikely to enable effective learning. This research explores how devices function in technological display and device ecologies or ecosystems to support human thinking, learning and sensemaking. Based on the theories of Vygotsky's sign mediation triangle, we contribute a method that may allow one to evaluate how technology configurations support (or hinder) students' thinking. Our method proposes the concept of objectification as a way to identify the potential or opportunity for learning in technology ecologies. The significance of such an evaluation methodology is considerable, given the nascent field of sensemaking and the lack of consensus on evaluation in such contexts: our research advances a principled approach by which device ecologies can be examined for their potential to provide 'learning experiences', and enables one to articulate affordances for the design of technological spatial environments that can help to support higher thought. Our contribution thus is in terms of methodology, theory, evaluation and the design of technology ecologies.
Master of Science

What have dams, toxic industries, oceans, and nature reserves got to do with psychic life? What are the psychic economies of colonial and postcolonial environmental relations? What, moreover, does psychoanalysis have to do with postcolonial environmentalisms? This thesis will advance a psychoanalysis that is materialist – attending to both the materiality of the body and the materiality of the environment. It is my contention that the usefulness of postcolonial “uses” of psychoanalysis lies in future engagements with critical medical theory and the biological sciences. Through these fields we are increasingly aware of the “environmental” constitution of the subject. I reach beyond the human-centered environment typical of psychoanalysis and conceptualise a material basis for psychic life. The chapters in this thesis reveal the subject as always-already immersed in and interpellated by ecological materialisms (pollution, disease, epigenetic acquisitions, extinction). In this thesis, I use the term “ecologies of skin” to allude to the material and psychic “skin” as an environmental category: a substrate for our environmental relations. I situate the skin of the subject within new biomedical ecologies (the microbiome) and the ecologies of the colonial environment (its nexus of forced labour migrations, its uneven distributions of disease and environmental “sanitation”, and its production of materially deprived environments). I work across a range of colonial and postcolonial contexts in which environmental relations are inflected by the politics of skin. These contexts include: rural and urban reserves and the politics of water reservoirs in Zimbabwe, immigrant labour and environmental sanitation in Canada, socio-spatial assignments in apartheid South Africa, and land rationalisation and the racial politics of the nature reserve in post-genocide Rwanda. I show how colonial environmental racism – which I further refine as epidemiological racism – forms a constitutive nexus for psychic life. Ultimately, I contend that the postcolonial co-implicates our psychic proclivities with our ecological situation and that this co-implication is the wider resonance and continuing lesson of the postcolonial beyond its initial purview.

A crescente mercantilização da produção agrícola e do mundo rural, provocada pela modernização da agricultura, aliada ao processo de abertura econômica e de desregulamentação dos mercados que ocorre nos países da América Latina a partir dos anos 90, vem submetendo as formas familiares de produção a uma situação de crise econômica que promove, entre outros, a redução das possibilidades de reprodução das famílias de agricultores. Nesse contexto, a continuidade das formas familiares de produção no meio rural está condicionada a mudanças nas estratégias de alocação do trabalho e dos recursos no interior das unidades de produção e das famílias. Entre as mudanças citamos: (a) a desmercantilização da produção agrícola (afastamento sistemático, estratégico e gradual dos mercados de insumos); (b) a vinculação estrategicamente organizada aos mercados de produtos; e (c) a diversificação das fontes de renda e das formas de inserção profissional das famílias. A partir desses referenciais sobre a crise de reprodução social da agricultura familiar e sobre as alternativas necessárias à continuidade dessa forma social, este trabalho tem como objetivo central analisar se a proposta agroecológica no município de Ipê/RS apresentase como uma alternativa concreta, ampliando/modificando/viabilizando as estratégias de reprodução social dos agricultores familiares ecologistas. A fim de destacar as transformações geradas nas estratégias de reprodução a partir do momento em que as famílias passam a praticar a agricultura ecológica, optamos pela utilização de uma comparação entre famílias de agricultores ecologistas e famílias de agricultores não ecologistas. Através dessa comparação foi possível analisar também a utilização das estratégias de adaptação por famílias de agricultores não inseridas na proposta agroecológica. Foi possível concluir que a mercantilização das estratégias produtivas e reprodutivas em Ipê não ocorreu de forma homogênea entre as unidades familiares, mas, ao contrário, gerou uma diversidade de formas de relacionamento entre a agricultura e os mercados agrícolas. Neste processo, tanto no âmbito dos ecologistas, como no âmbito dos não ecologistas, certas esferas da produção e da vida social são mantidas fora dos circuitos mercantis, permanecendo traços de camponês, ou de colono, no agricultor familiar, seja na esfera da produção, seja na da reprodução social. No entanto, apesar da existência de traços comuns entre ecologistas e não ecologistas, e da manutenção entre as famílias de ambos os grupos de um certo distanciamento dos mercado, é possível afirmar que a inserção na rede vem promovendo entre os ecologistas alterações nos processos de inserção e dependência dos mercados. Neste novo processo de inserção mercantil destacam-se as novas formas de vinculação com os mercados de produtos e com o mercado de trabalho, através da recorrência à pluriatividade. Apesar dos gastos com a produção (consumo intermediário) e das necessidades de aquisição de custeio de safras serem menores entre os ecologistas, não foi possível identificar um processo de desmercantilização da esfera da produção, conforme prevíamos, o que pode ser atestado pelo maior imobilização de capital nas atividades produtivas e pela maior inserção dos ecologistas no mercado financeiro, principalmente para a realização de investimentos. Se não podemos afirmar a categoria desmercantilização, a relação entre os indicadores mostra a geração de processos de menor dependência ou maior autonomia destas famílias em relação aos mercados, o que, de acordo com o referencial teórico utilizado, amplia as possibilidades de reprodução social, pelo menos a curto prazo, das famílias ecologistas estudadas.
The growing mercantilization of agricultural production and of the rural world, forced by the modernization of agriculture, in connection with the process of economic opening and deregulation of the markets that is taking place in the countries of Latin America since the 1990s, is subjecting family farming forms to a situation of economical crisis which causes, among other consequences, the reduction of the possibilities of reproduction of rural farmer families as such. In this context the continuation of family farming in the rural environment would be conditioned to changes in strategies of work and resources allocation within the farms and families. These changes contemplate not only the economic reproduction but also the appreciation of the rural world and of the small farmer job. Such changes will consist of, for example: (a) demercantilization of the agricultural production – strategic systematic gradual detachment from the input market; (b) strategically organized attachment to the product market; and (c) diversification of income generation forms and of professional qualification of families. Starting from these concepts regarding the crisis of social reproduction of family farming and focused on the alternatives for the continuation of this social form in view of this crisis, this work has as main objective to analyze if the agroecology proposal in the Municipality of Ipê, State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, is a concrete alternative in terms of amplifying, modifying and making viable the social reproduction strategies of the ecological farmer families of this municipality. In order to highlight the changes generated by the reproduction strategies from the moment these families turned to ecological agriculture we chose to do a comparison between families of ecological farmers and families of conventional farmers. Through this comparison it was also possible to analyze the use of adaptation strategies among families that do not work with ecological agriculture. It was possible to end that the commoditisation of the productive and reproductive strategies in Ipê didn't happen in a homogeneous way among the family units, but, to the opposite, it generated a diversity in relationship ways between the agriculture and the agricultural markets. In this process, so much in the environmentalists' extent, as in the extent of the not environmentalist, right spheres of the production and of the social life they are maintained out of the mercantile circuits, staying farmer's lines, or of settler, in the family farmer, be in the sphere of the production, be in the one of the social reproduction. However, in spite of the existence of common lines among environmentalist and no environmentalist, and of the maintenance among the families of both groups of a certain estrangement of the market, it is possible to affirm that the insert in the net is promoting among the environmentalists alterations in the insert processes and dependence of the markets. In this new process of mercantile insert they stand out the new links forms with the markets of products and with the job market, through the appeal to the new activities. In spite of the expenses with the production (I consummate middleman) and of the needs of acquisition of costing of harvests they be smaller among the environmentalists, it was not possible to identify a process of commoditisation of the sphere of the production, as we foresaw, what can be attested by the largest capital immobilization in the productive activities and for the environmentalists' largest insert in the finance market, mainly for the accomplishment of investments. If we cannot affirm the category reduction of the commoditisation, the relationship among the indicators shows the generation of processes of smaller dependence or larger autonomy of these families in relation to the markets, which, in agreement with the theoretical references used, it enlarges the reproduction possibilities social, at least short term, of the studied environmentalist families.

Dissertação(mestrado)-Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação Ambiental, Instituto de Educação, 2011.
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A preocupação central deste estudo está em compreender como o processo de constituição da identidade surda é estimulado na escola e como esta prática está articulada às Três Ecologias proposta por Félix Guattari. A pesquisa ocorreu em uma escola especial para crianças surdas, em uma turma de alunos da educação infantil, onde a professora também é surda. Os dados foram produzidos por meio de observação da prática da professora e das relações que nos ocorrem nos diversos ambientes por onde as crianças circulam na escola. Também foram realizadas entrevistas com a professora surda, a ex-professora ouvinte da turma, a fonoaudióloga e os pais. Articularam-se estas práticas discursivas e não discursivas com as Três Ecologias. Esta pesquisa utilizou-se das aproximações teóricas dos Estudos Culturais e Estudos Surdos, sob o viés da Educação Ambiental para discutir sobre a aquisição de uma identidade surda como a base para que o indivíduo surdo consiga situar-se e desenvolver-se neste mundo que, para eles, é ainda mais conturbado. Utilizaram-se os três registros guattarianos, que propõem uma articulação entre a ecologia mental, social e ambiental, para que conseguíssemos uma saída da crise de nossa época. Constatou-se que o processo de construção da identidade surda depende da convergência de inúmeros fatores que concorrem em toda a escola e não apenas no âmbito da sala de aula ou nas relações com o professor surdo. Nas práticas observadas no contexto escolar, foram percebidas evidências que vem ao encontro das dimensões ecológicas de Guattari que engendram o processo de desenvolvimento integral das crianças surdas. Nesta escola especial, elas aprendem com a professora surda, com seus pares e com toda a comunidade escolar a reconhecer-se e viver em harmonia com/no ambiente.
The main objective of this study is to comprehend how the constitution process of the deaf identity is stimulated by schools and how this practice is connected to the Three Ecologies proposed by Felix Guattari. This research was carried out with a group of preschool deaf children whose teacher is also deaf, in a special school. Data was collected during the observation of the teacher‟s practice and the relations in the whole school environment. The teacher, the former teacher (who observed the classes), the speech therapist and the parents were also interviewed. These discursive and non-discursive were then related to the Three Ecologies. This research used the theoretical issues of the Deaf Cultural Studies in the light of Environmental Education in order to discuss the acquisition of a deaf identify – which is the basis that makes the deaf live and develop in this world (a more disturbed one for them). Guattari‟s proposal to connect the ecologies of mind, society and environment in order to find a solution for our contemporary crisis is used. I have observed that the construction process of a deaf identity depends on several factors which are part of the whole school context, rather than just the class and the relation with the deaf teacher. Evidence of Guattari‟s ecological dimensions – which suppose deaf children‟s whole development – was also perceived in the school practices. In this special school, with the help of their deaf teacher, their peers and the whole school community, the children learn how to recognize themselves and how to be in harmony with their environment.

(Agro)pastoralism in Sahelian Niger, as elsewhere, operates through household enterprises. Katsinen-ko’en (Fulбe) households, interconnected within kin and community networks, utilize a range of flexible strategies to manage a variety of ecological and economic risks. This dissertation argues that (agro)pastoralist households and communities maintain or improve viability in risky environments first by employing various mobility patterns, among other strategies, and relying on the tightly knit interdependence between household and herd. Secondly, households that most successfully sustain a cooperative integrity (i.e. partnerships between husband and wife, or wives, and parents and children) to negotiate decisions and strategies best withstand adversities such as droughts. The continuance of vital links between household and herd helps the household enterprise more easily weather difficult times and profit during advantageous times. Thirdly, the transfer of endowments from parents to children of ecological, economic and political knowledges and socio-economic networks ensures the continuity of family livelihoods. This dissertation analyzes a range of household/herd mobility patterns on a livelihood continuum from sedentary agropastoralism to exclusive pastoralism, and the household decisions that lead to those mobilities. In this way, it adds to a growing body of literature that examines household strategies employed in very uncertain natural environments, contributing to pastoral studies and environmental anthropology. By folding household economics and political ecology into household ecology, it analyses resource and asset transfers within and between households, all under the influence of the natural and political-economic environments. Contributing to development anthropology, I argue that the most important buffer against the risks of unpredictable environments is a stable, undivided household, migrating with and managing its own herd. I conclude by showing how development research and projects should support household/herd integrity to enhance livelihood security. When government or development agencies institute policies and projects that remove children from the household, or separate households and herds, they endanger the integrity of the household and the reproduction of livelihoods that make essential contributions to national economies. Rather than urging pastoralists to modify their livelihoods to fit images held by ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION administrators, these organizations and agencies should help pastoralists to build on adaptations that already facilitate their management of risky environments.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many scientifically cognizant young novelists turned away from the physics-based tropes of entropy and chaos and chose biological concepts of order, complexity, and self-organization as their dominant metaphors. This dissertation focuses on three novels published between 1991 and 1996 that replace the notion of the encyclopedia as a closed system and model new narrative ecologies grounded in the tenets of the emergent science of complex systems. Thus, Richard Powers's The Gold-Bug Variations (1991) explores the marriage of bottom-up self-organizing systems and top-down natural selection through a narrative lens and cautions us against any worldview which does not grasp life as a complex system; Bob Shacochis's Swimming in the Volcano (1993) illustrates how richly complex global behavior emerges from the local interaction of a large number of independent agents; and, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) enacts a collaborative narrative of distributed causality to investigate reciprocal relationships between the individual and the multiple systems in which he is embedded. Unlike many other contemporary authors, the new encyclopedists do not shun the abundance of information in postmodern culture. Instead, as I demonstrate here, the intricate webs of their complex ecologies emerge as narrative circulates through diverse informational networks. Ecologies of Knowledge argues that these texts inaugurate a new naturalism, demanding a reconciliation between humans and the natural world and advocating an increased understanding of life's interdependent patterns and particularities. Grounded in such an awareness of ecological complexity, these large and demanding books are our survival guides for the twenty-first century.
Department of English

The nature and experience of participation in school mathematics classrooms is considered through the analytical frames of community of practice theory (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) and the lifeworld by focussing on interactions generated by verbal teacher questioning of the whole class. The thesis reports on an explorative, personal inquiry that complements theoretical reflection with research material generated through interviews with learners of mathematics and by participant observation in school mathematics classes. The methodology is qualitative, hermeneneutical and engaged, and influenced by the principles of participative action research and co-operative inquiry in the context of post-modernist thought. The concept of usual school mathematics is developed to describe dominant social practices in mathematics in schools. Through an analysis of teacher questioning and the learners' experiences of it, the meaning of participation is problematised. The nature of marginal rather than legitimate peripheral participation in usual school mathematics classrooms shows that they are not communities of practice and are better described as regimes of practice. 'Ecologies of practices' is proposed as more flexible construct that allows the diversity of networks and practice in classroomsto be theorised. The nature of particular ecologies can be described(and researched) using similar dimensions to community of practice theory and this is illustrated by a case study which contrasts usual school mathematics practices with those that foster greater engagement by participants. The concept of the lifeworld supports understanding of the different experience of participants in ecologies of practice of mathematics and teacher questioning. The entities in mathematical lifeworld of learners of mathematics are not just simpler versions or a smaller subset of those in teachers' lifeworld but are existentially and ontologically different and this requires investigation. A case study of a mathematical lifeworld shows school mathematics can be deeply existentially alienating and marginalizing for learners. Students' views on ways of increasing engagement in questioning practices are presented and the implications of the research for engaged, transformative and democratic classroom practice with regard to teacher questioning is considered. Key conclusions of the thesis are: The analysis of the participation of participants in usual school mathematics practices as marginal demands that such practices be questioned; An ecological perspective allows the complexity of the variety of forms of participation, enterprises and engagement in classrooms to be analysed; The concept of the lifeworld supports an understanding of the diversity of meaning that arises for participants in the same ecologies; There are questioning practices that foster fuller participation by learners.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Page 132 blank.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 127-131).
25 years after India initiated its landmark reforms for economic liberalization, it continues to be challenged in balancing rapid economic growth, inclusive development and environmental sustainability. As the world seeks ways to curtail emissions ahead of a critical juncture in climate change, India's choice - representing 17.5% of humanity, of a growth-propelled, market-led development pathway has the potential to offset global efforts with irreversible consequences. Kalinganagar, located in the resource rich northeastern peninsular belt, is a paradigmatic case of neoliberal industrial urbanism. Here, the demand for commodities and resources from a burgeoning, globalized, aspiring middle class subordinates communities depending on natural environments within their localities for livelihood security and most material needs. Habitats of its indigenous populations, once marginalized rural hinterlands, are now sites of multilateral contestations as neoliberal policies and governance enable their transformation into geographies of extraction. The ensuing severance of linkages between communities and their landscape results in the loss of a critical interest group in the preservation of natural ecologies. In an impasse between fallacious optimism and cynical pessimism, the thesis explores the synergetic prospects of grassroots governance and liberal capitalism, for a rurban model of regional development. Keywords: neoliberalism, deterritorialization, fringe, armatures, industrial urbanism, rurbanization, new village
by Mayank Ojha.
S.M.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.
Pages 156-157 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-155).
This thesis seeks to unpack the nature of ecology within architecture, not as a neutral science, but a legitimizing construct, building a future and transforming the ethics of the present towards very deliberate ideological ends, and contingent on certain practices of alienation which themselves have historically laid the groundwork for later environmental and social crisis. The thesis asks the question, what do we mean when we call an architecture ecological, and what sort of reality are we advocating within that practice. The project is not staged explicitly as a critique of ecology, but rather a challenge to the overwhelming neutrality with which the ecological project is entertained within architectural discourses, under the premise that an ecological awareness must first entail an awareness of the means by which ecology constructs unreal realities in order to work for us. The project takes place in Almeria Spain, which in the last forty-five years has gone from the poorest region in Spain to one of the richest, through the wide scale application of greenhouse urbanism. Almeria is currently the largest intensive agriculture site in the world (80,000acres) and supplies the majority of winter produce to Europe. But Almeria is also, in many ways, an accelerated microcosm of larger contemporary ecological paradigms, what Keller Easterling called an autonomous world, Almeria is a place in which the apparent neutrality of ecological ideologies are consistently leveraged towards technological transformations of the landscape precipitating widespread environmental and social fallout conditions. In Almeria, Ecological ideologies consistently serve as the legitimizing platforms by which transformation after transformation (each promising an ideal future) compound the effects of peripheral disaster all under the guise of a seemingly neutral science. The thesis argues that within a condition in which neutral ecology is leveraged to legitimize specific ideological and economic positions, it may actually be the task of an ecological architecture to irrigate radical alternatives, not as ideal futures, but as provisional presents, alternate ecological life rafts within contested environmental conditions. This thesis proposes one such alternate present. It interjects itself within the most recent technoecological shift from chemically applied agricultural practices which are rapidly being replaced with the promise of a genetically engineered future, a 'clean' Almeria in the wake of widespread chemical fallout. The alternative is formed from a seemingly simple question, what if we merely doubt that Almeria's genetic turn won't precipitate alternate forms of fallout equal to its chemically contested state.
by Curtis Roth.
M.Arch.

This dissertation revolves around the riddle of how to honor seemingly disparate traditions such as West African (Dagara) divinatory practices and Western philosophical praxis. The project, following the participatory approach of Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, sets out to honor these differences by embracing the agapeic-erotic metaphysics of William Desmond, and in so doing delimits modern distinctions between science, philosophy, religion, and anthropology. Rather than move beyond the important scholarly contributions of these fields, however, this dissertation embarks on an interdisciplinary adventure between these traditions by critically reading the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in parallel with Desmond. This project articulates multiple ecologies of participation, with totemism, animism, and naturalism foremost among them. It clarifies how Descola and Viveiros de Castro's robust reading of animist/Amerindian shamanic perspectivism is in keeping with Ferrer and Sherman's participatory enaction. It is critical of Viveiros de Castro's dismissal of totemism as overly abstract, as well as Descola's conflation of naturalism solely with post-Enlightenment thought, and his broad use of the category of analogism to include disparate traditions such as Vedic, Ancient Chinese, Greek, West African, and Central American thought. By way of clarifying this critique, this dissertation applies the same participatory understanding offered to animism by Descola and Viveiros de Castro to both totemic (divinatory) and naturalist (metaphysical/philosophical) enactions, placing all three under the broader heading of ecological perspectivism. The subsequent comparative lens allows for a more balanced reading of these three ecologies by broadening the use of these terms. By including the work of Desmond, it also answers important concerns leveled by critics regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of Descola and Viveiros de Castro's assertions regarding ontological relativity. In so doing, this project sets the stage for renewed dialogue between what are often seen as radically divergent traditions (e.g., the animism of the Achuar, the totemism of the Guugu Yimithirr, and the naturalism of modern science).

This practice-based project investigates modalities of performing eco-aesthetic assemblages across the modern nature―culture divide. Assemblages are here understood as non-hierarchical associations between bodies that are different amongst themselves. I argue that eco-aesthetic practices that work towards naturalcultural assemblages contribute to the wider field of ecological thought and cultural understanding of the nonhuman environment or nature. The research uses a transversal practico-theoretical approach that, following posthumanist and neomaterialist elaborations of ontology and epistemology, creates a ‘material-discursive entanglement’ (Barad, 2007) of bodies and concepts. In this posthuman continuum of practice, I argue that eco-aesthetics is an ethico-political disposition of fostering relations of accountability and responsibility with the bodies implicated in performance, especially the nonhumans understood to be minorities in the current politico-economic organisation. The research is situated within the landscape of modern biopolitics, which is understood as a set of conceptual and material strategies of appropriation of life through the ‘logic of colonisation’ (Plumwood, 1993). Situated naturalcultural performances enact a different modality of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with the world, by creating and maintaining fields in which life is seen as a force of generative difference. The dissertation is divided in three parts which correspond to three entangled modes of performing research. The first part is a critical ontology which individuates operative modalities of modern boundary-making techniques. This part also outlines an alternative landscape of art and philosophy which go beyond binary thinking. The second part, through a posthumanist reconfiguration of the concept of assemblage from Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, and apparatus, in the work of Michel Foucault and Karen Barad, shapes an analytics for locating possibilities of material-discursive reconfiguration of the existing power relations. The third part follows the narrative of my artistic projects that sought to create naturalcultural performances with plants, trees, molecules of carbon-dioxide, sheep, and earth. This material-discursive entanglement of critique, analytics and performance as artistic practice together shapes a posthuman ecological praxis that is oriented towards naturalcultural justice.

The discipline of sustainability theory now represents a mature and established discourse. Significant sustainability discussions will be occurring at this moment in many locations. These discussions may potentially enact decisions impacting on our local and collective futures. This dissertation is prompted by observations, over many years and in diverse forums, of how the quality of coillective thought in such discussions sets the potential for societal developments. This research responds to the specific situation where in intelligent, informed, significant, well-planned and representative sustainability forums the complexity of questions faced may exceed our collective capacity to discover viable sustainability solutions. The initiating question of this research was: What is a means by which to disclose the capacity for thought in human social systems? This dissertation examines the parameters for the depiction of the dynamic capacity of thought ecologies. The proposition developed is for the use of "conceptions' as a unit of observation. The approach operates much like the use of the organism in the study of complex ecologies in ecological systems theory. A novel contribution is in the discovery of how an ecology of thought requires from us some distinctly different assumptions. This research extends knowledge from the fields of psychology, sociology, ecology and systems theory by a structured multi-disciplinary approach. An abductive method grounded in Peircean pragmatism is used and a methodological framework is developed from existing research theory specifically for the study of thought-ecologies. The framework comprises nine inquiry phases that build sequentially toward a hypothesis. This sequence of abductive inquiries provides a discrete structure to and methodological rigor for each inquiry phase. The relevant theory, method design, emphasis selection, and research outcomes are set out for each inquiry in separate chapters, with each chapter using a consistent structure. In summary, the appropriate location for observation is selected using the example of sustainability theory (Chapter One). Conceptual feasibility is established by detecting phenomena from conceptions of health (Chapter Two). Primary propositions are developed from an analogical isomorph in neurobiological autopoiesis theory (Chapter Three). Three inter-related hypotheses are proposed for systems of conceptions (Chapter Four). The viability of the hypotheses is confirmed using five criteria from a panarchy analysis (Chapter Five). Definitions are formulated for the key dimensions proposed (Chapter Six). A comparison of existing measurement modalities provides the criteria for a measurement system (Chapter Seven). The approach to modeling n-dimensional hypervolumes for systems of conceptions is demonstrated (Chapter Eight). The proposed hypothesis is appraised on principles of explanatory coherence and pragmatism (Chapter Nine). This dissertation concludes with an integrative reflection (Chapter Ten). The result of this research is to provide a theoretical basis for the depiction of systems of conceptions. The practical outcome achieved is the ability to observe the capacities of thought-ecologies by their depiction in three-dimensions. The significance of the research is to enable forms of social learning to enhance present and future capacities for sustainability thinking.

Le theme de la presente these est le rapport entre l'ecologie et la politique au bresil. Tout d'abord, nous avons analyse les pensees liberale et conservatrice et leur conception dont le fondement est la nature en ce qui concerne un projet de construction nationale. L'ecologie en tant que sujet politique et social est apparue au bresil pendant les annees 1980. Il emerge du processus de democratisation de la societe bresilienne qui a favorise la resurgence de nouveaux acteurs sociaux et politiques. Nous avons developpe l'ecologisme en deux aspects: a) en tant que mouvement social; b) en tant que parti politique. Encore que nous ayons privilegie l'analyse du parti vert au bresil. Le mouvement ecologiste est notamment plus important que le parti proprement dit. Ainsi avons-nous consacre un chapitre a la lutte de chico mendes et a l'organisation des peuples de la foret pour sauver l'amazonie. La grande question de notre these est de savoir s'il existe un espace autonome pour l'ecologie au niveau socio-politique. Pour approfondir cette question, nous avons analyse les programmes des autres partis bresiliens afin d'en preciser la maniere dont le theme ecologie a ete aborde. Quant au parti vert, nous avons etudie : son origine, son manifeste, son programme, son programme de gouvernement, ses conventions, ses allies politiques, sa performance electorale, ses problemes juridiques. Ensuite, nous avons cherche a caracteriser, a travers une typologie, les differents courants de la pensee ecologiste. Dans la conclusion, nous avons developpe quelques propositions provenant des
The theme of the following thesis is the relation between ecology and policy in brazil first of all, we've analysed liberal and conservative conceptions based on the nature as far as a project of national construction is concerned. As a political and a social subject, ecology appeared in brazil about 1980. It comes from democratisation process of brazil society, that involves new social and political actors'emergence. The development of our work is divided in two parts. The first part deals with ecology as social association (ngo) and, the second one, with ecology as political party. Therefore, brazil green party survey has been developed in this line. Ecologist association is, among others, more important than green party. So, in a chapter, we've studied chico mendes'struggle and forest people's organisation to save amazonia. The great question coming from our thesis, is to know, if there is an independence space for ecology based on a socio-political way. For a deeply answer we've analysed programs of other brazil political parties. This, to make us able to precise how ecology theme is developed. According to green party, we've studied its origin, proclamation, program, government plan, election platform, political allies, electoral results and its juridical problems. To end, we've noticed, throughout a typology, the different theories of ecology conception. In conclusion, we've developed few proposals from intellectuals concerned by this subject

Cette etude fait le point sur les caracteristiques ecologiques de la partie la plus chaude de l'ecosysteme hydrothermal profond. Il s'agit d'un milieu complexe dans ses dimensions spatiales et temporelles. L'environnement physico-chimique est variable a de multiples echelles. Aux phenomenes temporels aleatoires et chaotiques se superposent des phenomenes periodiques dont les plus significatifs sont gouvernes par les cycles de maree. Cette variabilite permet aux organismes particulierement tolerants de coloniser ce milieu difficile et d'y subsister. Les microorganismes sont tres abondants a la surface des cheminees, mais diminuent tres fortement dans les premiers cm d'epaisseur. Archaea et bacteria sont distribuees differement. La faune du pole chaud est dominee a 13n/epr par les polychetes alvinellidae, dont la biomasse est elevee. Le recrutement est discontinu, sans doute synchrone au niveau d'un site ou d'un champ. Les alvinellidae semblent presenter un developpement non-planctotrophe en contradiction avec la distribution des especes. Un modele de dispersion est propose, qui indique que les courants de fond seuls ne peuvent expliquer ce paradoxe. Le deplacement de l'activite hydrothermale le long des dorsales permet peut-etre, a long terme, aux organismes ne disposant pas d'une phase de dispersion tres efficace, de coloniser de nouveaux habitats de proche en proche.

In the postwar era of the United States, as military-industrial chemicals leak into airways, waterways, and foodways in unprecedented plumes and cancer clusters, comic art forms generate diverse environmental imaginations. Though historically disparaged as disposable ephemera, comics provide unique access to environmental expression in this critical period. This dissertation analyzes the formal registers of two independent newspaper strips and four graphic cancer narratives for an aesthetics of equity: a set of verbal-visual moves that chart awareness of environmental devastation as determined by privilege and power. The iconicity of the drawn body--its lines, shape, and movement--grapples with complex legacies of environmental harm and exclusion. Maps of environmental risk perception generated through game board motifs, collages, and icon repetition rely on the capacity of sequential art to engage readers in recognizing and analyzing postwar risk. In form and theme, an aesthetics of equity in comics deploys environmental knowledges subordinated and sharpened by interlocking social inequities. This aesthetics revises the elisions and assumptions of mainstream environmentalisms. Ultimately, comics demand a literacy particularly well suited to environmental justice (EJ) ecocriticsm. The dissertation comprises three chapters of analysis. The first examines competing environmental discourses in Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For (1982-2008). This newspaper strip coincides exactly with the start of the contemporary EJ movement. In examining three character arcs across a quarter of a century, I track the emergence of EJ discourse in Bechdel's distinctly lesbian environmental imagination. The second chapter examines the heteronormative limits of the EJ story arc in Jackie Ormes' midcentury romance strip Torchy in Heartbeats (1953-4). Published weekly in the Comic Section of the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, Torchy chronicles its eponymous heroine's quest to end environmental racism in the fictional small town of Southville. Torchy's affect and body language revise romance genre conventions and expose sexism and racism as intersecting environmental oppressions. The third chapter examines transcoporeal exchange in four contemporary graphic cancer narratives from the early 21st century. This chapter examines the extent to which graphic cancer narratives "move out," to use Diane Herndl's phrase, to form coalitions with disparate environmental communities.
2015-10-17

How do norms guiding peacekeeping change, and who are the important actors in this process? Using sociology of professions and practice theory, this thesis seeks to advance constructivist theorizing of norm change in international organizations by a closer look at UN peacekeeping. The thesis argues that ambiguity is deep-seated in UN peacekeeping and that basic norms (grundnorms) and norms guiding peacekeeping operations are often in conflict. The thesis highlights the role of practices in two ways. First, special envoys and representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSGs) can act as norm arbitrators through actions in the field and have bottom–up influence on norm change in the organization. Second, various ‘ecologies’ such as think tanks and academia have, together with member states and UN officials, formed informal policy alliances to establish new norms, principles, and concepts such as ‘responsibility to protect’ and ‘integrated missions,’ effectively constituting and driving norm change in the international system. This thesis sees these processes as social practices that advance change in the organization. With this contribution, the study further expands the understanding of which actors have agency and what sources of authority they draw on in norm change processes in international organizations. The UN can be seen as a competitive arena where informal policy alliances, or ‘linked ecologies,’ put forward ideas on how to solve policy issues. In a broad sense, the UN is an arena where informal alliances are formed around issues of common concern; and, with the financial support of donor states and knowledge production of think tanks, academia and the working level of the UN, ownership among member states is built in consultative processes.

After languishing for many years in the periphery of the field as a tacitly closed off concept, visuality is back on the agenda of Visual Culture Studies and, with it, the issue of power. In contrast to its informal use as a term to describe the ‘social fact’ of the visual, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s full scale reappraisal of visuality has revealed its strategic, military genealogy. However, in this and other revisionist accounts, the theory of twenty-first century power remains a predominantly hegemonic one, with visuality operating as an outside force, a power that structures and defines the reality of a world to which we remain subject. In this essay, by identifying emergent tendencies in the logic of capitalism, I present an alternate account of the present. I expose a post-hegemonic visuality which operates by co-opting the radical and experimental energies of digital culture, a visuality which no longer defines a fixed world but exploits the distributed social powers of ‘worlding’, a visuality which taps into and mediates our collective potential to make and remake new worlds. I situate this worlding visuality in the science-fictional context of what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘control society’. In so doing, I attend to the principal lacunae of the field – capital and labour – and examine how social and cultural activities previously identified with ‘resistance’ are increasingly integrated within a dynamic, complex system of power. By focusing on this ‘media ecology’, and taking into consideration the broader cultural implications of network technologies, I dispute the popular rhetoric of the digital and challenge conventional definitions of ‘the visual’. Indeed, I contend that a newly intense visuality necessitates a transformation in current attitudes toward the aesthetic, and that we must examine more closely the realm of bodily affect. I emphasize, throughout, a new temporality of control, insisting that it is crucial we now recognize an immanent, ontological visuality, a power which utilizes the ‘always-on’ communicational relations of a culture associated with cloud computing. To undertake such a study, I employ and adapt a set of tools which (though largely unfamiliar to the field formally identified with visual culture) stimulate the energies expressed in several realms of contemporary thought, particularly those assembled as ‘Non-Representational Theory’. My explicit contribution to the field is formulated around an argument for the need to go beyond representation, and, moreover, that to achieve any critical purchase on digital culture, theories of visuality must attend to the realm of the virtual, as outlined by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others. For examples, I turn to some apparently familiar places: advertising, television, film and gaming. But, in making transversal intersections across divergent disciplines, I also find expressions of this emergent visuality in less conventional spheres: in twenty-first century literature, in software procedures, in socio-biological experiments. Rather than images to be ‘read’ or interpreted, I take the relations and disjunctions between such examples to be symptoms of a new capitalist visuality, one that manipulates and exploits the multiple, paradoxical nature of the real.

京都大学
新制・課程博士
博士(地域研究)
甲第23308号
地博第289号
京都大学大学院アジア・アフリカ地域研究研究科グローバル地域研究専攻
(主査)准教授 D'SOUZA Rohan Ignatious, 教授 中溝 和弥, 教授 藤田 幸一, 准教授 中村 沙絵
学位規則第4条第1項該当
Doctor of Area Studies
Kyoto University
DGAM

This research examines the life science and video games industries in Liverpool. Previous research on agglomerations and cities tends to focus on epicentres or high concentration places such as Silicon Valley or global cities such as London and Tokyo, neglecting the northern post-industrial cities such as Liverpool, Leeds or Newcastle. Equally, many studies tend to focus in on one particular industry, whereas this research examines two key knowledge economy sectors in one place. Petilis (2012) argues that the cluster literature has become overemphasised and lacks analytical ability in the investigation of smaller firms and highly diverse concentrations of activity. An alternative ecological perspective is used in this thesis, which is considered more reflexive and flexible to the composition of the agglomerations seen outside the epicentres of the global economy. Using the heterarchical approach, as outlined by Grabher (2001), this research investigates the emergence and organisation of Liverpool’s life science and video game industries. It reveals the changing composition of the industries in Liverpool and how firms are connected into wider production networks beyond Liverpool. Finally, the research analyses how the two industries are situated in the anatomy of the city. The key findings are generated from a mixed methodology utilizing qualitative semi-structure interviews with owner-managers, industry informants and supporting institutions. Secondary quantitative data has been used gathered from annual reports, company websites, industry association and office for national statistics. Firstly, it is argued that the two industries emerged in Liverpool under different conditions and are on different trajectories, conditioned by local events and global mechanisms in the wider industry. Such trajectories have aided the rise or the fall of various structures and institutions within the city of Liverpool. This has resulted in a life science industry that resembles an institutionally thick anatomy and a video games industry that resembles an institutionally thin anatomy. Secondly, key findings regarding the organisation and connections beyond Liverpool highlight the fact that both industries show a lack of internal connectivity within the ecology and depend significantly on their external connections for inputs in production. For the life sciences this is exacerbated with the high level of product diversity between firms decreasing the likelihood of potential internal connectivity in production or joint resource utilization between firms. Thus firms rely on their external connections for finance and resources in order to further the production of their products through licensing and merger and acquisition agreements. Thirdly, the video games industry has gained greater autonomy over production analogues to that of the industry norm. For the life sciences, the rigidity in the generic business model is reinforced by the high levels of regulation and intellectual property protections and reduces the ability of some smaller firms to complete a product. Overall, we see two key knowledge economy sectors emerging with changing degrees of functionality as a result of global changes in the industry and the development of institutional infrastructures around these two sectors.

Master of Landscape Architecture
Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning
Jessica Canfield
The contemporary globalized world is full of wicked problems. A wicked problem is difficult to resolve, complex, and solving one aspect of a problem may create other problems. Wicked problems are shaped by invisible forces and flows. Landscape architects are uniquely poised to address wicked problems with their skills and capacity to think across systems and scales in spatio-temporal, ecological, and cultural dimensions. Landscape architects also communicate through visually-accessible methods which tell a story. Storytelling in landscape architecture seeks to reveal, connect, and tie together relationships and processes of the past and present to inform future possibilities of a place. Methods of storytelling can be used to address wicked problems because of their utility in inquiry and ideation. Developed through an original methodology using maps, diagrams, photomontage, and photographs, this project creates a storytelling framework which iteratively uses inquiry and representation to identify dilemmas, pose questions, and address issues as a means to reveal the impacts of forces on a wicked problem. The site selected to test this proposed methodology is the Athabasca oil sands in northern Alberta, Canada. Visible from space, the potential minable area of the oil sands spans an area the size of New York State. The world’s quest for oil has placed this landscape and its people on center stage. Billions of dollars’ worth of industry investment has put the landscape and people under siege through ever-shifting visible and invisible forces and flows. Dilemmas created by the region’s mining industry not only directly impact local people and landscape, but the greater world as well. Hampered with environmental, social, political, and economic issues, the future of this region is largely unknown, as there are few formal plans and regulations to ensure landscape reclamation and guide urban development. To tell the story of the oil sands, four themes—oil, infrastructure, environment, and people were analyzed. These themes—referred to as "ghost ecologies" because of their inconspicuous nature—when considered together, reveal key regional dilemmas and highlight new opportunities for future directions. Analysis inspired thinking toward future scenarios that imagine a series of new, highly productive and programmatically-integrated futures for the oil sands and its people. The unique process of inquiry and discovery led to a final project framework that identified methods for landscape architects to use in addressing wicked problems. A variety of audiences can consume this work to address the challenges of the Athabasca oil sands and other wicked problems in the world. To the public, the work serves as an evocative display of critical dilemmas worthy of future consideration. For professional and student landscape architects, the work reveals methods of inquiry to address wicked problems through the discipline.

Cette these puise sa motivation d'un jeu qui apparait chez les insectes dits parasitoïdes, qui, dans le cadre d'une competition sans merci pour la conquete d'hôtes via lesquels se reproduire, s'en prennent directement a la descendance de leurs semblables. Il s'agit de superparasitisme.
Bien souvent, les hotes se presentent sous forme d'agregats epars dans l'environnement. Ainsi le cadre spatio-temporel de ce jeu est-il celui de l'agregat. Agregat dont la composition, en termes d'hotes sains et parasites, evolue au cours du jeu, d'ou son caractere dynamique.
En premier lieu, nous presentons ce que sont les jeux dynamiques au travers d'un resultat original qui traite du decouplage des equations d'Isaacs dans les jeux differentiels a deux joueurs et somme non-nulle. Il se trouve illustre par un exemple a propos du conflit que cree la question des soins parentaux chez les especes bi-parentales.
Dans un second temps, nous revisitons la theorie classique de la cueillette optimale, que nous etendons a la prise en compte d'une multitude de joueurs. Se succedent alors, lorsque la competition se fait vive, des episodes de guerre d'usure, entrecoupes parfois de quelque treve.
Vient enfin l'etude du superparasitisme tel un jeu differentiel. Nous montrons notamment que le superparasitisme n'implique cette fois pas necessairement de guerre d'usure. Cela ouvre des perspectives tant au plan mathematique (singularites en jeux differentiels a somme non nulle) que biologique (experiences de laboratoire).

La question centrale de ce travail est celle de la relation entre finitude environnementale et liberté individuelle. Par finitude environnementale il faut entendre l'ensemble des contraintes écologiques variées qui posent des limites à l'action humaine. Celles-Ci sont de deux types généraux: les limites de disponibilité des ressources naturelles et les limites de charge des écosystèmes et des grands cycles biogéochimiques globaux. La thèse défendue ici est que les conceptions libertariennes et libérales de la liberté sont en conflit avec la nécessité de prendre en compte de telles limites et qu'une approche née-Républicaine est mieux à même de répondre à ces enjeux écologiques. les théories libertariennes, de droite comme de gauche, sont en particulier inadaptées à la prise en compte de la finitude des ressources naturelles car elles maintiennent un droit il l'appropriation illimitée de ces dernières par les individus. la théorie libérale de la neutralité, appuyée par le principe du tort (harm principle), est quant à elle inadaptée il la prise en compte des problèmes environnementaux complexes comme le changement climatique. Ces difficultés proviennent avant tout de deux traits caractéristiques de ces doctrines: leur ontologie sociale atomiste et leur conception de la liberté comme liberté de choix. Le néo-Républicanisme de Philip Pettit permet de répondre à ces deux problèmes grâce à son ontologie holiste et il sa conception de la liberté comme non-Domination. " propose donc une conception de la liberté compatible avec la finitude environnementale et permet de justifier des politiques écologiques exigeantes
The central issue of this work is that of the relationship between environmental finiteness and individual liberty. By environmental finiteness one should understand the set of diverse ecological constraints that limit human action. These limits are of two general kinds: on the one hand the availability of natural resources, and on the other hand the carrying capacity of ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles (chapter 1). The thesis defended here is that libertarian and liberal conceptions of liberty conflict with the necessity to take such limits into account. and that a neo-Republican approach is best suited to address environmental issues. Libertarian theories, right-Wing as well as left-Wing, are in particular not able to take resource scarcity into account because they argue for an unlimited right of individuals to appropriate those resources. The liberal doctrine of neutrality, as associated with the harm principle, is unsuitable when addressing complex environ mental issues like climate change. These difficulties stern above ail from two characteristic features of libertarian and liberal doctrines : their atomistic social ontology and their conception of freedom as liberty of choice. Philip Pettit’s neo-Republicanism on the ether hand is able to address these problems thanks to its holist social ontology and its conception of liberty as non-Domination. This doctrine offers a conception of liberty compatible with environmental limits and theoretical resources able to justify demanding environmental policies

Several gastrointestinal parasites of sheep have veterinary and zoonotic importance, including coccidia belonging to the genus Eimeria and proteobacteria belonging to the genus Campylobacter. In the UK, both Eimeria and Campylobacter are both frequently isolated from sheep faeces, and studies have shown that infections or co-infections by 10 or more Eimeria species may occur. Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli are the most frequently encountered sheepassociated Campylobacter species. Despite their potential veterinary and public health importance, little work has been reported to date exploring the ecologies of these microorganisms. This project addressed this shortfall by completing cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys of Eimeria and Campylobacter infections in sheep flocks in southern Cumbria. In total almost 1000 ovine faecal samples were collected on 27 visits to three farms in the region. Infections were diagnosed, and infecting species of both genera delineated, using well-established methods. These results were collated with information about the timing of sample collection and the age of sheep, and climate data. Significant seasonal trends in the epidemiology of Eimeria and Campylobacter infections were observed. Furthermore, the intensity of Eimeria infections was also found to be significantly correlated with season, but, in addition with sheep age, rainfall prior to sample collection and, interestingly, to Campylobacter co-infection. Another strand of the study was to assess the role of wildlife as reservoirs for sheep-associated campylobacters. A survey of red and roe deer living in the vicinity of the three farms studied failed to implicate either species in this role, suggesting they do not contribute to the natural persistence of these bacteria in Cumbrian sheep populations. Finally, in an attempt to develop new molecular methods for the delineation of sheep-associated Eimeria species, next-generation sequencing (NGS) was used to try and attribute 18S rDNA sequences to Eimeria species present in multi-Eimeria species co-infections. In initial studies, 18S rDNA libraries derived from mock communities of four chicken-associated Eimeria species were analysed to assess how accurately NGS data matched the relative abundance of each Eimeria species, determined using traditional oocyst counting methods. Unfortunately, no suggestion of a correlation was apparent. Overall the project clarified the epidemiology of two genera of significant sheep-associated pathogens and was able to identify some important ecological determinants of this epidemiology.

Focusing on the interdisciplinary context of the Independent Group (1952–55, IG from now), this thesis investigates the collision of visual arts, architecture and ecology in London across a period stretching roughly from the end of the Second World War (1939–45) to the mid-1970s. A traumatic, yet exhilarating time of rapid transformations, the postwar period was marked by an anxious insistence on bio-centric and eco-centric narratives of survival, integration, re-adaptation and above all, regeneration. In the mid-1940s, the shock and devastation of the war, coupled with a new attention to social welfare, had put the question of collective development under the spotlight, reigniting the age-old nature/nurture dispute across a number of governmental, academic and popular platforms. The economic boom of the 1950s and the onset of the consumer society advanced the terms of this debate to encompass new material realities and behavioural patterns. The IG was quick to register this shift. Ecology, anthropology and sociology gained popularity among group members as viable theoretical models with avant-garde credentials for mediating between nature and culture when confronting the particular phenomenon of a changing visual environment. The chapters in my thesis focus in particular on the work of the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, alongside the artists Nigel Henderson, Magda Cordell, and John McHale. Ranging from photography to painting, urban planning, exhibition design, criticism and fiction, their practices offer some of the most perceptive interpretations of how the new landscape was transforming society at its core.

Culture has been consistently underrepresented in the sustainability debate and often perceived as a constraining factor to modern-day advancement. However in recent years, the broadening development paradigm in the Global South is increasingly asserting culture's indispensable role in sustainable human development. This dominant cultural paradigm mainstreamed by UNESCO is subscribed to by government and other role-players within the domain of culture and urban development. Despite its significant achievements, it however comes with a specific heritage conceptualisation, which is disconnected from local reality and perpetuates a problematic theoretical construct of cultural legacy, which is steeped in a Eurocentric conservation bias with colonial undertones. The thesis argues that this model will not lead to transformative interventions in urban areas that harness the power of culture if its interpretation remains decontextualised and perpetuates an instrumentalised view of culture and cultural conservation practice, inherited from the past. The thesis explores how an alternative conceptualisation of culture, based on the concept of cultural ecologies, can be more meaningful and beneficial in contributing to the theoretical reassessment of the human settlements imaginary. This is achieved through an interdisciplinary literature review and a case study of Bagamoyo, a small urban settlement in Tanzania. Through a systematic diagnosis of this small scale locality, cultural ecologies are foregrounded through the primary lens of the urban public-private interface and framed within a context that is shaped by the dynamics of globalisation. Additionally, the study takes place against the backdrop of a failed UNESCO World Heritage application, which allows me to discuss the undercurrents and invested interests associated with cultural heritage politics and the traumatic impact global conventions can have on local sustainability. It concludes in a proposed approach that repositions culture at the core of social exchange and argues that cultural sensitive development is an ongoing socio-cultural production process. Its potential lies in capturing the layered 'ordinariness' of place and in harnessing the imaginative responses arising from local idioms, practices and traditions as the shared imaginary of tomorrow.

This book is about the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic. In it, the author argues that the definition of the fantastic presented by Tzvetan Todorov in 1970 can be used, provided it is first adapted to a media-ecological framework, to theorize the role of aesthetic participation in the creation of secondary worlds. Working within a hermeneutical tradition, Todorov understands reader participation as interpretation, in which the creative ambiguities of the literary object are primarily epistemological. However, it is here argued that the aesthetic object of the fantastic is also characterized by material ambiguity. The purpose of this dissertation is then to present a conceptual framework with which to theorize the relation between the material and the epistemological ambiguity of the fantastic. It is argued that such a framework can be found in an ecological understanding of aesthetic participation. This, in turn, entails understanding human subjectivity as a process always already embodied in a material environment. To this extent, the proposed theoretical framework questions the clear and oppositional distinction between form and matter, as well as that between mind and body, nature and culture, and human and non-human, on which a modern and humanist notion of subjectivity is based. And in this sense, the basic ecological assumptions of this dissertation are posthumanist, or non-humanist. From this position, it is argued that an ecological understanding of participation offers a means to reformulate the function of a number of concepts central to studying the aesthetics of the fantastic, most notably the concepts of media, genre and text. As the fantastic focuses on the creation of other worlds, it is an aesthetics of coming into being, of ontogenesis. Accordingly, it will be argued that the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic operationalizes the ontogenesis of media, genres and texts. By mapping the ontogenesis of three distinct media ecologies – the media ecology of fantasy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s secondary world Middle-earth; the media ecology of the American comic book superhero Miracleman; and the media ecology of William Blake – this book argues that the ecological imagination generates world. Per Israelson has been a doctoral candidate in the Research School of Studies in Cultural History at the department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Ecologies of the Imagination is his dissertation.

How can a literary theorist account for unselected texts and narratives, and measure the importance of voices no longer audible to readers today? The following dissertation uses various, and variously successful 19th century literary texts as a point of departure for considering the complex forces affecting the fragment of texts selected over time from within a wider field of anonymous and unwritten narratives. Bridging literary theory and Darwinian science, "Evolutionary Landscapes" argues that concepts of mutation, replication and selection can provide a framework for thinking about how narratives and genre developed in the 19th century United States. Current attempts to bring biological insights directly into literary study through evolutionary psychology or cognitive Darwinism ignore the complex systems, including cultural and market forces, that might have been used to predict a given text's chances for longer-term survival. The figure I choose to represent these economic, unwritten, and cultural influences on literary texts is the "adaptive landscape" developed by the geneticist Sewall Wright, and recently adapted by the evolutionary theorist Michael Ruse. The relationships between texts and ecologies fore-grounded in the following chapters, even when dealing with individual authors, necessitates looking at literature from the point of view of the random mutation and subsequent selection of texts in the face of a collectively determined ecology of formal expectations. My approach to the evolution of literature builds on the work of the literary critic Franco Moretti and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, although a turn to U.S. rather than British fiction casts a different light on literary evolution than that described yet by Moretti, and deals more specifically with questions of literary and cultural history than either Dennett's philosophy of memetics or Carroll's socio-biologically inflected Literary Darwinism alone would allow. The 19th century literary ecology to which the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Edward Bellamy and Mary Wilkins Freeman were well or poorly adapted can be imagined as a kind of fitness landscape where literary publications are drawn towards the peaks climbed by previous writers, representing conventions or formula that proven successful in the past. A gradualist focus on textual silence and extinction within literary evolution, along with evolutionary and ecological theory, can provide abstract models to make visible the complex ecology of oral, cultural, written, printed and reprinted information that constitutes the "soft tissues" always missing from the archival past.