3 December 2024, 4pm
Simon Building, Room 2.57 [maps and travel]
Online access options to be confirmed.

Prof Des Fitzgerald, University College Cork

Forest Time: Landscapes of RETVRN and the memory-politics of ecotherapy

Abstract: 

In this talk, I’ll try to connect literatures on psychological culture and environmental racism, through a study of the cultural politics of forest bathing. One of a range of contemporary eco-therapeutic practices, forest bathing is a nature-based wellbeing practice, in which a guide leads participants through a series of mindfulness meditation exercises in a forest or wooded area. The central claim of the practice is that the sensory affordances of the forest can have a significant positive effect on mental wellbeing. Though there are growing literatures on the psychology, economics, history and lived experience of forest bathing, there has been only limited critical attention from more critical literatures to its philosophical or ideological underpinning. Based on interviews with forest bathing guides, I will show that the core therapeutic promise of forest bathing is grounded in a logic of temporal return: forest bathing returns the participant, first, to an individual childhood state of being in free and close context with nature. But it also returns them, second, to a collective pe-industrial social condition, in which the human environment was more suited to the biological inheritance of human beings. IN the talk, I want to think this data through recent attention to how reactionary political movements are also animated by a fantasy of environmental loss and ecological return.  At the heart of the paper is a claim that visions of temporal return to innocent nature, which animate forest bathing as well as many adjacent eco-therapeutic practices, are not nearly separable from a contemporaneous far-right fantasy of environmental ‘RETVRN’ – an explicitly political vision that situates the industrial present of modernity as degenerate, pathological, out of kilter, and profoundly unnatural.

Des Fitzgerald is Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at University College Cork, where he is based at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and in the Department of Sociology & Criminology. A sociologist by training, he has particular interests in sociologies and histories of the psychological sciences, in social and cultural theory, and in urban studies.

All welcome! Please come along if you are interested in the topic.

Seminar Convenors: Professor Carsten Timmermann and Dr Meng Zhang

Seminar Programme on the CHSTM Website

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