This thesis explores the interaction between well-being and environmental volunteering. Focusing on five case study groups across Scotland, the emotional, social and physical well-being impacts of active environmental volunteer work are examined. Through an extensive ethnographic approach incorporating in-depth interviewing, participant observation and focus group work the thesis highlights the importance of studying the initial and continuing motivations for individuals to participate in environmental volunteering. This retains a particular focus on emotional and embodied volunteer experiences, exploring the importance of tasks and landscapes on the volunteering encounters. In considering the meaning of volunteering, the thesis also explores linkages of community and citizenship and how individuals frame and understand their volunteering, especially in relation to the environmental aspects of the work. This speaks directly to academic themes of embodiment, human-nature interactions, emotional geographies and social capital. The studentship was an ESRC-CASE funded project, with the CASE partner being Forestry Commission Scotland. The research takes place within a dynamic political context that encompasses current research and work on volunteering and natural environment encounters within Scotland and the UK as a whole. The thesis looks to inform ongoing policy relevant debates on environmental volunteering within both the Forestry Commission Scotland and the Scottish Government.

Au regard des débats actuels polarisés autour du concept de « personne », cette recherche se donne comme but d’explorer l’approche du théologien orthodoxe Dumitru Stăniloae relative à la personne dans son versant anthropologique. À cet effet, le présent travail tâche d’une part de repérer et de révéler les éléments qui édifient sa réflexion de la personne, à savoir les composantes de la personnéité humaine, et d’autre part, les sources à la fois théologiques et philosophiques ayant inspiré et influencé de manière déterminante notre auteur. Expression d’une jonction de la théologie patristique orientale (byzantine) et de la pensée moderne, la personne comporte ainsi, chez Staniloae, une structure ontologique-communautaire, dont le pôle ontologique plonge ses racines dans l’héritage des Pères et le pôle relationnel ou communautaire, dans les avancées de la réflexion moderne : associée à l’hypostase des anciens, la personne se définit comme mode de subsistance ou d’existence réelle de l’être, tandis qu’assimilée au sujet et au moi modernes, elle se présente comme facteur conscient et libre en relation d’amour avec autrui. Représentée donc comme subsistance en soi et existence en communion, la personne manifeste, chez notre auteur, l’aboutissement de toute une série de confluences : du passé et du présent, de l’Orient et de l’Occident, de la théologie et de la philosophie, de l’orthodoxie et des deux autres confessions chrétiennes. / Considering the current debates polarized around the concept of "person", this research aims to explore the approach of the orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloae relative to the person in its anthropological side. In this purpose, the present work tries on one hand to identify and to reveal the elements which compose his reflection of the person, namely the components of the human personhood, and on the other hand, the theological and philosophical sources having inspired and influenced our author. As a junction of the oriental patristic theology and the modern thought, the person contains, at Staniloae, an ontological-communitarian structure. The ontological pole plunges its roots into the inheritance of the Fathers and the relational or communitarian pole, in the progress of the modern reflection: associated with the hypostasis, the person is defined as mode of subsistence or real existence of the being, whereas likened to the subject and to the modern I, it appears as conscious and free factor in relation of love with others. Thus represented as subsistence in itself and existence in communion, the concept of person is the outcome of a whole series of confluences: of the past and of the present, of the East and of the West, of the theology and of the philosophy, of the orthodoxy and of two other Christian confessions.