Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4024-6692

Date Available

12-20-2024

Year of Publication

2024

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Geography

Advisor

Dr. Theodore Schatzki

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the proposition that beauty—specifically, experiences of beautiful places in the natural world—can contribute to the emancipation of modern persons (and thereby developed societies) from instrumental rationality, which is theorized as a major driver of contemporary socioecological crises of the Anthropocene. Buber’s concept of the I–Thou relation provides a framework for conceptualizing ideal non-instrumental relations. The project’s methodology, rooted in post-phenomenology, consisted of semi-structured remote interviews and four follow-up focus groups with 35 then current and recently former residents of Juneau, Alaska. Taken together, data confirm that experiences of beautiful places in the natural world can and do foster non-instrumental, I–Thou relations between humans and the more-than-human world.

Chapter 2 provides an explication of the project as a whole: It elucidates instrumental rationality as a source of ecological crisis, and beauty as a relational phenomenon that can foster mutual relations between humans and nonhumans. Chapter 3 addresses an impediment to beauty’s emancipatory potential: social acceleration (SA), that is, the speeding up of the pace of life throughout modernity. Not only does SA compel people to instrumentalize experiences of beauty, it also produces “frenetic standstill,” a societal sclerosis that entrenches status quos; in the context of the Anthropocene, it abets unsustainable, quick-fix "solutions" to socio-ecological crisis. Chapter 4 addresses the socio-ecologically deleterious effects of individualization, a phenomenon of modernity in which people are increasingly forced to identify and act as individuals, rather than as members of collectives. Via Indigenous and more-than-human geographies, place is claimed, like beauty, to be a relational phenomenon that possess emancipatory potential. Beauty and place are then theorized as mutually reinforcing — at times even co-determining — allies in the fight against the Anthropocene-inducing effects of individualization.

All told, this project testifies to the power experiences of beautiful places in the natural world and practices like it to foster more just, caring modes of relation amongst humans and between humans and their more-than-human cohabitants.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.503

Funding Information

Barnhart–Withington Fellowship, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky

Download

Share

COinS