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Managing and understanding the environment and its issues is not limited to one environmental discourse but to numerous discourses. It is created through histories which result in contradictions as narratives may oppose each other. This opposition is considered an important aspect of discourse. This article explores how biodiversity and sustainable development were discursively constructed by indigenous women living in an agricultural society with distinct cultural practices closely linked to rice farming and examined the outcomes arising from their construction of biodiversity and sustainable development. Seven women farmers were interviewed and conversations were transcribed, coded and analyzed through discourse analysis using Maarten Hajer's conceptual tool. Five major discourses emerged from this study: conserving biodiversity through the notion of contrasting views on farming responsibilities, conserving biodiversity through a sense of community, sustainability of government initiatives, negotiating cultural heritage and economic benefits, and articulating sustainable development.

Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005, interest has increased in cultural ecosystem services (CESs) research to understand the complexity of the non-material benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. The intangible and interactive characteristics of CESs present many challenges regarding how to approach, quantify and even define CESs. In this paper, we suggest looking at CESs through the lens of embodied and situated cognition theories. We advocate that such an approach should be applied to the development stage of CES research projects, as the embodied and situated experience of the site aids the development of research questions and future interventions. We described a case study—namely, the Environmental Empathy Research Challenge, which took place during the ColLaboratoire 2020 Research Residency in the Philippines. This case shows how interactive, embodied and situated workshops, such as Embodied Empathy and Walking Maps, contributed to developing a research proposal and a novel research framework, ecological embodied cognition (EEC). EEC focuses on the concept of environmental empathy to redefine the human-environment relationship. Further, based on an example of a participatory research activity, Sensing-Playing-Moving, we examined how interventions founded upon EEC principles enhance environmental empathy.

No abstract

Managing and understanding the environment and its issues is not limited to one environmental discourse but to numerous discourses. It is created through histories which result in contradictions as narratives may oppose each other. This opposition is considered an important aspect of discourse. This article explores how biodiversity and sustainable development were discursively constructed by indigenous women living in an agricultural society with distinct cultural practices closely linked to rice farming and examined the outcomes arising from their construction of biodiversity and sustainable development. Seven women farmers were interviewed and conversations were transcribed, coded and analyzed through discourse analysis using Maarten Hajer's conceptual tool. Five major discourses emerged from this study: conserving biodiversity through the notion of contrasting views on farming responsibilities, conserving biodiversity through a sense of community, sustainability of government initiatives, negotiating cultural heritage and economic benefits, and articulating sustainable development.