Intractable Romanticism: Art, Nature, and Practices of the Aesthetic in Three Contemporary Settler Ecologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to demonstrate how contemporary art and current approaches to spaces of nature in settler colonial North America carry the layered aesthetic and philosophical legacies of Romanticism. It argues that the relationship between the aesthetic and ecology is one of co-constitution and mutual entanglement, where both art and nature act as parallel forces that perpetuate the Romantic subject. This is a critical issue, as scholars have already established that Romanticism constrains environmental justice and is complicit in capitalism and settler colonialism. The first chapter examines the overlapping theoretical space reserved for nature and art in Kant’s aesthetic theory, where nature underpins aesthetic reflection. Then, through field observation, interviews, and archival materials, I address three natural environments as case studies, to demonstrate how Kant’s theory informs the production of art and nature at these sites today. Although I draw from critical geography, environmental history, and anthropology, I approach each environment much as an art historian encounters a work of art: by attending to its history, form, and viewership. My first case study is Lake Louise in Banff National Park. By addressing the site as an idealized aesthetic form, I demonstrate how the moral authority thought to be contained in nature’s “truth” is harnessed to biopolitical and nationalist projects. My next chapter considers the countercultural aspects of a former industrial site turned wild bird sanctuary located on unceded territory in North Vancouver. This analysis considers outdoor art installation amidst efforts to “decolonize” through notions of return, with a focus on an artwork by Ken Lum. The third case study considers the Assiniboine Forest in Winnipeg, a once neglected urban forest now turned “nature park.” Here the aesthetico-moral and formal logics underpinning ecological practices take contrasting forms: a cultivated “wild” encapsulating one concept of “ecological integrity” and “Canada’s Diversity Gardens” where ecology serves neoliberal multiculturalism. By using art historical methods to denaturalize productions of settler colonial nature, I demonstrate that an attention to the aesthetic’s Romantic genealogy is as essential for understanding contemporary ecological practices at a time of climate crisis and calls for decolonization as it is for analyzing art.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".