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Title: Exploring Environmental Worldviews: Imaginaries, Ideologies, Frameworks, EcoTypes
Abstract: How explore environmental ideas without idealism? The most recent, compelling answer by geographers and others involves the concept of imaginaries. In these sessions, contributors have deployed imaginaries in a variety of settings, illustrating the power of this approach. I wonder, however, where we might place imaginers and imagining in our work on imaginaries—and whether we might assess the imaginativeness of these imaginaries? I also wonder whether we are ready to place our scholarly imaginaries in greater symmetry alongside our work on popular imaginaries? What I propose involves a dialectic btw ideologies, expressed as ideological attractors, and imagining, to give better, more active focus to imaginaries. I also propose a consideration of both as frameworks—structured conceptual assumptions—especially among scholars. I offer a background on imaginaries, then propose a model relating ideologies and imaginaries (mindful that scholars of imaginaries may not be friendly to this amendment). I then offer a background on ideologies, and develop a notion of ideologies as attractors deployed by powerful actors. I then review the concept of frameworks, especially as deployed by scholars, with examples. Building on this approach, I introduce the EcoTypes educational and research initiative, first by contrasting it with the ubiquitous New Environmental Paradigm framework used in environmental worldview assessment, then by introducing how EcoTypes determines attractors and imaginaries inductively, via a broad survey based on the premise of environmentalism in the plural—that many care, just differently. I close with an exploration of imagining strategies in EcoTypes, navigating difference between one and two.
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