Where are you at? Re‐engaging bioregional ideas and what they offer geography

Hubbard, Ella; Wearne, Samuel; Jónás, Krisztina; Norton, Jonny; Wilke, Maria

doi:10.1111/gec3.12722

Cited by 2 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Combining the results of these methods gave us a grounding in the different ways that the terms are currently being used and have been used, who is using them, and which users/uses are most prominent. Results of this work are summarised in Section 3 and elaborated upon in Hubbard et al (2023).…”

Section: Me Thodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bioregions are a central concept in bioregional thought and have helped to mobilise different expressions of bioregionalism. Bioregions have been described along a continuum of interpretations, from those that emphasise their existence as 'natural' expressions of the land, to those that view them as culturally constructed 'landscapes of the mind' (Hubbard et al, 2023).…”

Section: What Are Bioregions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Early ontological tendencies (Hubbard et al, 2023) that call for regionally scaled action and acts of 'becoming native' (Berg & Dasmann, 1977) have been critiqued for taking indigenous concepts as inspiration but appropriating them into Western power structures and naturalising settler claims to place (Tuck & Yang, 2012;Wiebe, 2021). They have also been critiqued for their potential to foster deterministic perspectives about the connections between nature and culture that can be exclusionary and anti-cosmopolitan (Olsen, 2000).…”

Section: ) Calls For Bioregional Proponents To Consider 'The Body Of ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, bioregional thought is not static and has seen various shifts in emphasis. In Hubbard et al (2023), we outlined a summary of this history, describing three tendencies in bioregional thought.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, a more recent and emerging 'processual tendency' uses 'bioregioning' as a verb (Thackara, 2019). This draws on both ontological and critical perspectives and emphasises the process, rather than the ends, of change (Hubbard et al, 2023). With bioregional terms and concepts returning as visible features of major academic conferences (Transformations, 2023); popular books (Brewer, 2021;Kimmerer, 2020;Wahl, 2016); and in the language of various move- This paper explores findings from a collaborative learning journey into contemporary bioregionalism, framed as 'bioregioning'.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A learning journey into contemporary bioregionalism

Wearne,

Hubbard,

Jónás

et al. 2023

People and Nature

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Bioregioning is a new wave of bioregional discourse that appears to be attracting interest among sustainability researchers and practitioners. Through interviews with contemporary leaders and a reflexive research process, we explored bioregioning experiences across seven countries. Our paper outlines the motivations, practices and narratives that we encountered and positions these observations against prior expressions of bioregional thought and broader themes in sustainability research. We found that in bioregioning, the concept of a bioregion remains important and seems to attract people to the discourse in three ways: It inspires visions of the future that encompass more‐than‐human thriving, it creates a conceptual container that enables a strategic narrative for change that connects places to larger scales, and it justifies the importance of everyday people exercising their right to ‘do’ something. The combination of these motivators shows bioregioning's relationship with earlier expressions of bioregional thought: Like early bioregional thinkers, regional scales carry cognitive and strategic appeal, and like critical bioregionalism, power and justice are foregrounded to ensure the process of change is ethical. We suggest that in the shift to bioregioning, the bioregion serves as a boundary device, justifying (for some) a focus on regional scale action which has made bioregional discourse unique, and for others, rationalising participatory or emotional priorities. This lets bioregioning enact a dialogic approach to change and enables practitioners to consider questions of scale in open dialogue with emotive place‐based dynamics, bringing nature re‐connection and social–ecological systems research into consideration and overlap with the practice of bioregioning. We observed parallels between our research process and the central features in bioregioning; both respond to ambitions and calls within sustainability to enact relational values and surface contextualised knowledge while also valuing generalisations and abstraction. Our study, we suggest, provides one example of how research into human–nature relationships in Western sustainability might be pursued in line with these ambitions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

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Section: Me Thodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What Are Bioregions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ) Calls For Bioregional Proponents To Consider 'The Body Of ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

A learning journey into contemporary bioregionalism

Wearne,

Hubbard,

Jónás

et al. 2023

People and Nature

Self Cite

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Whose “place” is it? Using corpus-based techniques to sketch place-based sustainability discourses in public and academic forums

Wearne,

Riedy

2024

Sustain Sci

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Calls for a “place-based” approach to sustainability are increasingly common in the field of sustainability transitions and transformations (STT). To critically explore the agendas and politics a call towards place carries, we undertook a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) to examine a sample of public and academic texts from 2019 to 2020. Two distinct discourses about place were evident: an environmental discourse framing place as an assemblage of more-than-human constituents and an anthropocentric discourse framing place as a human community. These discourses present vastly different priorities about which species matter, what change entails, and what kind of future we should create. Our findings reflect the emergence of a discourse coalition that advocates for a place-based approach to STT, and we discuss how this viewpoint has continued to emerge since the compilation of our data. Our paper provides an overview of the discursive landscape we encountered, synthesises a central narrative about place-based STT based on what we observed, and provides a critical discussion of the tensions and opportunities that this narrative raises. In doing so, we suggest there remains an opportunity for fruitful dialogue amongst sustainability educators, sustainability practitioners, and researchers to refine what a place-based approach to STT looks like. By demonstrating an application of CADS, we hope to show how digital tools and techniques can be used to research discourses in sustainability. We outline specific opportunities to take this forward, including a broad opportunity to use web-derived corpora to help survey discursive landscapes, and a more specific application to explore discursive dynamics between communities, places, and at different spatial scales.

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Where are you at? Re‐engaging bioregional ideas and what they offer geography

Cited by 2 publications

References 78 publications

A learning journey into contemporary bioregionalism

A learning journey into contemporary bioregionalism

Whose “place” is it? Using corpus-based techniques to sketch place-based sustainability discourses in public and academic forums

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