Ecological Hope

: Practices, Affects and Imaginaries in European Ecovillages

Abstract

Civil grassroots movements such as community energy coalitions, cohousing schemes and self-sufficient gardening cooperatives have garnered increased academic attention in recent years. Terming these initiatives ‘prefigurative’, social scientists speculate on their importance for overcoming dominant political, economic and environmental systems, precisely as they create alternative options beyond. Whilst the theoretical contexts, practical modalities and diverse applications of prefigurative impulses are well studied, however, the micropolitical affordances emerging out of grassroots futures-making activity remain relatively unexplored, particularly in respect to environmental practice. Looking to the personal and affective dimensions involved in prefiguring sustainability, this thesis draws posthumanist and nonrepresentational theories into an analysis of European ecovillages, which are conceptualized as small-scale models of socioenvironmental transition. Using semi-structured interviews, participant-led data collection and autoethnography, I explore how ecovillage visitors encounter their idiosyncratic routines, spatiomaterial architectures and collective socialities. The findings, borrowing from anthropologist Ingold’s notion of the ‘taskscape’, demonstrate that ecovillages introduce ethos-based labours, affective-temporal (re)attunements and practices of ‘doing together’ that support regenerative modes of human-nonhuman worlding. As such, the thesis proposes that ecovillages configure experiences of ‘ecological hope’ – defined as the anticipation of, and felt sense of possibility for, reconciling human-nonhuman relations. Analysing the distinct qualities of ecological hope existing in ecovillages, I evidence its complex material, affective and social attributes, foregrounding the contextual and relational dimensions at stake. At the same time, however, ecological hope is identified to entail intense pedagogical processes of un/(re)learning that disrupts privileged histories, as well as selective social imaginaries that can produce limited ways of seeing and knowing, often as a means of articulating hope. Overall, then, this thesis argues that experiences of ecological hope in ecovillages are: a) configured by concrete interventions in geographies, lifestyles and species relations that enable practical experiments toward, and the exercising of personal agency for, building something ‘otherwise’; b) often contingent on their ‘bounded’ taskscapes that secure and protect material, affective and relational logics beyond unsustainability; and c) by no means ‘untroubled’.

Date of Award	4 Feb 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Naomi Millner (Supervisor), Keri Facer (Supervisor) & Negar Elodie Behzadi (Supervisor)