Connecting with and Caring for Nature: Practical Bricolage, Investment, and Identity at an Urban Nature Centre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the practice of connecting with nature as a path to caring for the environment. It is based on a 5-year ethnographic project at a nature organization in Toronto, Ontario that facilitates nature programs for children, adolescents, and adults. The dissertation asks: (1) What leads people to engage in the practice of connecting with nature? (2) What mechanism links connecting with and caring for nature? and (3) How do people who engage in this practice understand the environmental identity of the naturalist? The dissertation describes my findings that: (1) people engage in the practice of connecting with nature through a process of practical bricolage that combines nature’s materiality and the culture of nature connection; (2) people link knowledge and emotion during the connecting with nature practice, and these links create opportunities for extending the self into nature, such as people thinking of themselves as people who “love fungi”, which leads to caring for nature; and, (3) the identity of the naturalist is partially embraced by those who have a consistent relationship with nature and they primarily define it through knowledge and spending time relating to nature outside. To explain and elaborate these findings, the dissertation engages with theoretical discussions in environmental sociology, cultural sociology, and social science more generally on investment and the self, personal initiative and identity, the material/cultural debate, and the sociology of becoming. Moreover, it develops analytical frameworks of care, emotion-knowledge interconnections, identity, and the co-constitution of the material and cultural. The dissertation also highlights how the practice of connecting with nature and the naturalist identity are not equally distributed and discusses how access to this practice and to the naturalist identity can be understood as part of advancing sustainability. Practically, the dissertation demonstrates that a consistent relationship with nature over time, rather than single life-changing experiences, leads people to take interest in the practice of connecting with nature and helps people learn to care for nature.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".