CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Morris, Olea Elizabeth Beverly |
|---|---|
| Title | Communing With Others: More-Than-Human Communities Of Mexican Ecovillages |
| Summary | This dissertation explores the entanglements of knowledge and place in the construction of sustainable socioecological systems by focusing on the emergence of ecovillage communities in Mexico. Ecovillages, or communities designed with the intention of creating self-sustaining sociecological systems, have grown in popularity in recent years, reflecting a growing interest in communal living, regenerative agriculture, and degrowth as responses to climate change. Framed as “laboratories of sustainability,” or sites where sustainability knowledge might be produced, scholars have speculated how insights gleaned from existing ecovillages might be scaled up or transposed to other contexts. In contrast, this work places a critical focus on placemaking as a co-creative process between human and more-than-human ecovillage residents, asking how the conception and practice of sustainability mutually shape one another. This research helps to better understand the politics of knowledge creation that underlies divergent sustainable imaginaries, or visions of how ecologically harmonious livelihoods might be pursued, which in turn depend closely on the more-than-human relationships that anchor them to place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in ecovillages across Mexico, I explore how different plants, animals, insects, and microorganisms are drawn into and influence the narratives of each community, and how these other beings contest, revise, or unmake human plans for them. I use these examples to argue for an understanding of sustainability that accounts for both more-than-human futures and the place-based socioecological contexts in which sustainability projects are situated. |
| Supervisor | Aistara, Guntra Anda |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/morris_olea.pdf |
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