your thoughts please?: ecotypes as...

0 views
Skip to first unread message

James Proctor

unread,
Aug 8, 2023, 11:03:26 AM8/8/23
to ecot...@googlegroups.com
Dear EcoTypes collaborators, hello! I'm finalizing EcoTypes for 2023-24, and would appreciate any thoughts you may have on the terminology I've decided to deploy to describe EcoTypes, as you will be defining EcoTypes for your students, and my recommended terminology may or may not work for you.

For those in a hurry: I recommend we rethink approaching EcoTypes as values, ultimately suggesting we approach EcoTypes as imaginaries—a challenging term to convey to students!

Here is a summary for fellow instructors, with more detail to come in the EcoTypes book, as well as a short version to be provided on the EcoTypes detail page...once I figure out how to say the below more simply.
  • Many people approach EcoTypes as values, but the concept is fuzzy outside of its proper use in psychology, where e.g. values are broad predispositions, while attitudes/beliefs have referent objects ("attitudes about conservation"; "beliefs about anthropogenic climate change"). You may know some major cross-national studies of values (e.g., WVS), for which there is a bit of slippage in the concept, but still those values are broad things (e.g., "Secular-rational values"; see also Schwartz values such as "Openness to Change"). 
  • A common issue with values talk is that people often approach them as individual-scale entities, sort of like choosing what clothes to wear: I have these values, you have those values. This problem is exacerbated when you assess values via surveys [methodological individualism]—clearly an important challenge in EcoTypes! So, recently I've described EcoTypes as frameworks, or as worldviews, suggesting something bigger. (In particular, worldviews suggests EcoTypes as a fuller alternative to the popular but limited NEP survey, often invoked in the literature to assess environmental worldviews.) There might be other terms you could choose similar to these: narratives or discourses come to mind, for instance, each with their own literature and limitations.
  • Separately, I've been collaborating with fellow geographers on environmental imaginaries; see e.g. a presentation I gave related to multiple sessions on imaginaries I organized for our national meeting last March. This is a rich and theoretically robust research area; my own contribution approaches imaginaries as creative weavings of ideological attractors, thus relating both individual and collective (social/political/etc.) dimensions of ideas—hence, we each imagine, but the raw material of our imagining is common to many of us. If so, one can approach the poles of EcoTypes themes (say, nonhuman Place or big Action) as attractors, which share the broad statistical nature of mathematical attractors; and EcoTypes are literally built on these three themes. We can thus approach EcoTypes as generalized patterns in environmental imaginaries—always premised on the empirical reality that these patterns are derived from EcoTypes survey completions.
So, our students may be comfortable with approaching EcoTypes as reflecting their values, but we may wish to recommend they approach their EcoTypes as imaginaries. 

But this term is not at all as common as values! Can it work with students? How might I offer a summary on the EcoTypes site sufficient for your students to usefully reflect on their EcoTypes as imaginaries—for instance, to consider how their life experiences may have led them to craft imaginaries with some attractors vs. others; or, to explore the social origin and reproduction of these attractors?

Those are the conceptual questions I'm pondering at present. If you have any good ideas, please share with me; and thank you for your consideration. 

Wishing you well for the remainder of your summers! 

Regards,

Jim P.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages