Ecologies for Learning and Practice provides the first systematic account of the ideas of learning ecologies and ecologies of practice and locates the two concepts within the context of our contemporary world. It focuses on how individuals and society are being presented with all manner of learning challenges arising from fluidities and disruptions, which extend across all domains of life. This book examines emerging ways of understanding and living purposively in these new fluidities and provides fresh perspectives on the way we learn and achieve in such dynamic contexts. Providing an insight into the research of a range of internationally renowned contributors, this book explores diverse topics from the higher education and adult learning worlds. These include: The challenges faced by education systems today The concept of ecologies for learning and practice The role and responsibility of higher education institutions in advancing ecological approaches to learning The different eco-social systems of the world—local and global, economic, cultural, practical, technological, and ethical How adult learners might create and manage their own ecologies for learning and practice in order to sustain themselves and flourish With its proposals for individual and institutional learning in the 21st century and concerns for our sustainability in a fragile world, Ecologies for Learning and Practice is an essential guide for all who seek to encourage and facilitate learning in a world that is fundamentally ecological in nature.

This book explores an exciting range of creative engagements with ecologies of place, using geopoetics, deep mapping and slow residency to propose broadly based collaborations in a form of ‘disciplinary agnosticism’. Providing a radical alternative to current notions of interdisciplinarity, this book demonstrates the breadth of new creative approaches and attitudes that now challenge assumptions of the solitary genius and a culture of ‘possessive individualism’. Drawing upon a multiplicity of perspectives, the book builds on a variety of differing creative approaches, contrasting ways in which both visual art and the concept of the artist are shifting through engagement with ecologies of place. Through examples of specific established practices in the UK, Australia and the USA, and other emergent practices from across the world, it provides the reader with a rich illustration of the ways in which ensemble creative undertakings are reactivating art’s relationship with place and transforming the role of the artist. This book will be of interest to artists, art educators, environmental activists, cultural geographers, place-based philosophers and postgraduate students and to all those concerned with the revival of place through creative work in the twenty-first century.

What is the responsibility, or the task of the arts as we face environmental crisis? Ecologies in Practice is an edited collection of dynamic and multi-formatted contributions that explore the ways in which cultural production informs perceptions, communications, and knowledge of environmental distress in a Canadian context, pointing to the significance of the arts in the creation and sharing of crucial counter narratives and alternative possibilities. Ecologies in Practice identifies the arts as an important mode of inquiry for reimagining, and for public engagement and understanding of pressing environmental and social concerns, while acknowledging the ways in which it contributes important work to the growing interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities. Bringing together artistic perspectives from a range of lenses and voices, including artists, writers, scholars, activists, curators, theorists, and makers, Ecologies in Practice offers important tools for artists, scholars, students, and research-creators invested in arts and the environment. Contributors present artistic methods as alternative sites of understanding that contribute significant and affective work to environmental scholarship, while thinking outside of the disciplinary borders and confines of the artworld. Ecologies in Practice aims to initiate vital conversations among practitioners, and together with readers, consider what environmentally engaged arts lend differently to these conversations.

Architect and philosopher Hélène Frichot examines how the discipline of architecture is theorized and practiced at the periphery. Eschewing a conventionally direct approach to architectural objects – to iconic buildings and big-name architects – she instead explores the background of architectural practice, to introduce the creative ecologies in which architecture exists only in relation to other objects and ideas. Consisting of a series of philosophical encounters with architectural practice that are neither neatly located in one domain nor the other, this book is concerned with 'other ways of doing architecture'. It examines architecture at the limits where it is muddied by alternative disciplinary influences – whether art practice, philosophy or literature. Frichot meets a range of creative characters who work at the peripheries, and who challenge the central assumptions of the discipline, showing that there is no 'core of architecture' – there is rather architecture as a multiplicity of diverse concerns in engagement with local environments and worlds. From an author well-known in the disciplines of architecture and philosophy for her scholarship on Deleuze, this is a radical, accessible, and highly-original approach to design research, deftly engaging with an array of current topics from the Anthropocene to affect theory, new materialism to contemporary feminism.

The term “urban ecology” has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together “urban ecology” with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

Learning ecologies are a new way of interpreting our presence and actions in the world. An ecology of practice for the purpose of learning and performing provides us with opportunities for action, information, knowledge and other resources. It includes the contexts and places we inhabit and the spaces we create to reason and imagine. It includes our processes and activities for performing and creating new value. It includes our relationships and the tools and technologies we use and it enables us to connect and integrate our past and current experiences. While the first edition of the book was aimed primarily at educators working in higher education, this shortened version has in mind the people who support learning and development in organisations that are not primarily educational.

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. The field of ecology has moved from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. But ecology is not simply a project of the natural sciences. Researchers, theorists, social commentators, and designers have all used ecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a set of conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications. Projective Ecologies takes stock of the diversity of contemporary ecological research and theory--embracing Felix Guattari's broader definition of ecology as at once environmental, social, and existential--and speculates on potential paths forward for design practices. Where are ecological thinking and theory now? What do current trajectories of research suggest for future practice? How can advances in ecological research and modeling, in social theory, and in digital visualization inform, with greater rigor, more robust design thinking and practice? How does all of this point to potential paths forward in an age of climate change and the need for adaptation and mitigation? With Contributions of: Jesse M. Keenan, foreword to the second edition Charles Waldheim, foreword to the first edition James Corner Christopher Hight C.S. Holling and M.A. Goldberg Wenche E. Dramstad, James D. Olson, and Richard T.T. Forman Daniel Botkin Erle C. Ellis Jane Wolff Robert E. Cook Peter Del Tredici David Fletcher Frances Westley and Katharine McGowan Sean Lally Sanford Kwinter

The notion of ecology has become central to contemporary design discourse. This reflects contemporary concerns for our planet and a new understanding of the primary entanglement of the human species with the rest of the world. The use of the term ‘ecology’ with design tends to refer to how to integrate ecologies into design and cities and be understood in a biologically-scientific and technical sense. In practice, this scientific-technical knowledge tends to be only loosely employed. The notion of ecology is also often used metaphorically in relation to the social use of space and cities. This book argues that what it calls the ‘biological’ and ‘social’ senses of ecology are both important and require distinctly different types of knowledge and practice. It proposes that science needs to be taken much more seriously in ‘biological ecologies’, and that ‘social ecologies’ can now be understood non-metaphorically as assemblages. Furthermore, this book argues that design practice itself can be understood much more rigorously, productively and relevantly if understood ecologically. The plural term ‘ecologies design’ refers to these three types of ecological design. This book is unique in bringing these three perspectives on ecological design together in one place. It is significant in proposing that a strong sense of ecologies design practice will only follow from the interconnection of these three types of practice. Ecologies Design brings together leading international experts and relevant case studies in the form of edited research essays, case studies and project work. It provides an overarching critique of current ecologically-oriented approaches and offers evidence and exploration of emerging and effective methods, techniques and concepts. It will be of great interest to academics, professionals and students in the built environment disciplines.

Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia offers a unique insight into the non-human and spiritual dimensions of environmental management in a changing world. This volume presents a comparative, place-based exploration of landscapes across Asia and the entities, practices and knowledges that inhabit them. Rather than treating sacred mountains, terrains and water sources as self-contained, esoteric religious phenomena, the authors consider them within critical 'cosmopolitical ecologies' framings in which non-human entities are engaged as actors in the socio-political arena. The chapters include case studies of healing springs recognized by governments, and sacred mountains that are addressed by heads of states and Communist Party cadres, or that speak to the faithful through spirit mediums in a politics of re-enchantment. Contributors explore the diverse ways in which non-human entities such as forest spirits, reindeer, mountains and Buddhist Masters of the Land are engaged by humans to navigate environmental change and address a range of ecological threats from large-scale mining to climate change. Cosmopolitical ecologies approaches encompass the healing power of topography as well as transformative intimacies with other-than-human beings such as sparrows within an Islamic eco-theological poetic setting. In this light the book observes dynamic and creative processes of cosmological innovation including the repurposing of ritual to address challenges such as the Covid-19 epidemic. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environment and society across disciplinary perspectives in general, and to anthropologists, human geographers, political ecologists, indigenous studies, area studies, environmental sciences and environmental humanities scholars in particular. The Introduction to this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book brings together contributions from the natural and social sciences to examine the social and environmental dimensions of human health. Ecologies and Politics of Health has explicit makes substantive contributions to research and policy within these fields by addressing three key themes: the socio-political dimensions of human health; the ecological dimensions of health and vulnerability; and the intersections between the social and ecological dimensions of health.