This dissertation investigates, through weather metaphors in nature writing, how outdoor learning can be transformative. Although we have a robust history of books, essays, and poetry about experiences in weather-rich environments, education as a theoretical and applied field still lacks a philosophical foundation upon which to improve and expand outdoor pedagogy. Rather than proposing that the hermeneutical study of weather metaphors will lead to prescriptive lessons outdoors, this research aims to reveal the philosophy of transformative learning immanent in our experiences. With an increased philosophical understanding of the aesthetically transformative dimensions of outdoor experience, when our senses are most exposed, educators may take the next step of exploring what these experiences might do for the holistic education of students. This dissertation’s recognition of the aesthetic experiences students have in weather-saturated spaces promises to generate a richer definition of an effective learning environment.

The dissertation departs from the premise that the materiality of living organisms, usually studied by the biological sciences, is essential to the social sciences in order to understand how nature is transformed by, and also transforms the distinctly different materiality of social relations. Agricultural plants are an excellent illustration of this, because how societies produce with them coincides materially with how plants reproduce, i.e., with their various living processes. Despite these deep connections, the disciplinary divide between the natural and the social sciences has generated no conceptual tools for studying the materiality of living nature in the social sciences. To address this problem, the dissertation develops an original analytic framework that captures the transformations in living organisms through spatiotemporal categories. These are used to analyze the transformation of agricultural plants in three major contexts: Peasant farming, Mendelian genetics and molecular genetics. Spatiality and temporality serve as research tools for approaching the research material, consisting of scientific papers, handbooks and government documents that document the transformation of agricultural plants, spanning three centuries. The spatiotemporal concepts are shown to be versatile categories, appropriate for understanding the transformations in living nature, from molecules to agroecosystems. Moreover, they are also suitable for describing social processes, in particular the practices and strategies through which peasant farmers on the one hand, and scientists on the other, have transformed plants. The spatiotemporal categories therefore result in a common perspective for showing specific mechanisms that bridge societal relations and non-social materialities. Significant insights are gained about society's relationship to agricultural plants by specifying how - rather than only recognizing that - the materiality of living plants shapes and is shaped by societal relations. These include the important role of recurring material forms such as plant seeds, creating a hiatus in the transformation of an otherwise perpetually changing materiality that results in a `fulcrum' to their transformation; the spatiotemporal stabilization of plants as a material basis for dominant forms of organizing production in various periods; or the consequences associated with practical redefinitions of living processes that abstract widely from how plant materiality has been reproduced historically. The long-term perspective used to study the transformation of agriculture is also particularly useful for understanding contemporary transformations through molecular techniques beyond plants. Of particular interest is the `fluid' relationship between human labor and the living processes of microorganisms for their potential to transform the materiality of contemporary production.

The aim of this dissertation is to understand how worries over nature’s degradation, ensuing securitization practices, and emergent norms intersect in environmental protected areas. It concerns the Nilgiri Biosphere in Kerala, South India, and how regimes of nature protection effect the lives of its human inhabitants, the Kurumba, a so-called primitive adivasi tribe. Combining ethnography with archival research, it asserts that the labors and logics of nature protection, present and past, participate in a distinctly liberal problematic of competing securities, manifest in the tension between sovereign discretions and the freedoms of legal rights and market interests. This study makes two overarching claims. First, that during the colonial era, nature’s inessential character allowed for flexibilities in legal interpretation that furthered imperial ambitions. In the silence of the law, norms mediated by colonialist pejoratives operated to satisfy those ambitions, while supplementing the knowledge necessary for government. Second, analysis of recent environmental movements and ecological projects surrounding the Nilgiri Biosphere shows how norms derived from civil society are produced to intervene between security prerogatives and social freedoms. The upshot of these normative practices, I argue, is to depoliticize natures and agencies, while extending and intensifying security’s command of unruly natures. While ensuring lives lived in accordance to it, this normativity endangers those who fall short of or otherwise elude it. To understand this endangerment, I provide an interpretation of adivasi resistances and rejections, in particular the Kurumba turn to illicit cultivation of ganja in the Biosphere’s core area. I contextualize this turn within the history of forest-adivasi relations, recent adivasi actions elsewhere within the Nilgiri Biosphere, and the global discourses of indigenous peoples and the environment. I argue that by operating not through a putative politics of rights and interest, but through counter-conducts and illegalities, the Kurumba present a challenge to the political as such.

This thesis studies the exhibition device, the structure that manages the appearance of what-is-shown. It focuses on the transition from taxonomic to immersive display, two modes with a particular visibility regime in each case. The first shows animals and plants according to a scientific classification, the second exhibits the specimens in a simulation of their original habitat through artificial environments built with a naturalistic appearance. I demonstrate that the transition between these two modes has transformed our visual culture in a similar way to cinema, photography or artistic collections and I propose an ontology of the exhibition device based on four of its main operations: the management of visibility, the regulation of the intensity of appearing, the camouflage of oneself and the generation of space. Patented by Carl Hagenbeck in 1896, the Panorama was the first immersive model and marks the entry of zoos into the entertainment industry. I explain how since then, living collections cannot show their specimens without previously building the illusion in which to insert them. With an emphasis on the material culture surrounding zoos and gardens and the architecture of their devices, I analyze three key materials: iron, artificial stone and glass, as well as their impact on various transatlantic living collections. Ultimately, the construction of the illusion connects living collections with the genealogy of the artificial and immersion in force since the 19th century, a crucial link of this research with fields of study such as environmental humanities and Anthropocene studies. Dispositivos de exhibición de colecciones vivas: La contribución de zoológicos y jardines botánicos a la cultura visual transatlántica, siglos XIX-XXI. Esta tesis estudia el dispositivo de exhibición, la estructura que gestiona el aparecer de lo-que-se-muestra. Se enfoca en la transición de la exhibición taxonómica a la inmersiva, dos modos con un régimen de visibilidad particular en cada caso. El primero muestra a los animales y las plantas de acuerdo a una clasificación científica, el segundo exhibe los ejemplares en una simulación de su hábitat original a través de entornos artificiales construidos con apariencia naturalística. Demuestro que la transición entre estos dos modos ha transformado nuestra cultura visual de forma similar al cine, la fotografía o las colecciones artísticas y propongo una ontología del dispositivo de exhibición basada en cuatro de sus operaciones principales: la gestión de la visibilidad, la regulación de la intensidad del aparecer, el camuflaje de sí mismo y la generación de espacio. Patentado por Carl Hagenbeck en 1896, el Panorama fue el primer modelo inmersivo y supone la entrada de los zoológicos en la industria del entretenimiento. Expongo cómo desde entonces, las colecciones vivas no pueden mostrar sus ejemplares sin construir previamente la ilusión en la cual insertarlos. Con énfasis en la cultura material que rodea a zoológicos y jardines y la arquitectura de sus dispositivos, analizo tres materiales claves: el hierro, la piedra artificial y el cristal, así como su impacto en diversas colecciones vivas transatlánticas. En definitiva, la construcción de la ilusión conecta a las colecciones vivas con la genealogía de lo artificial y la inmersión vigente desde el siglo XIX, un vínculo crucial de esta investigación con campos de estudio como las humanidades ambientales y los estudios del Antropoceno.

Self-presentation of a corporation as a citizen committed to sustainable corporate responsibility can, according to scholarly findings, help the organization improve its reputation among key stakeholders. The purpose of this case study was to explore the success of one major airport in aligning communication strategies to improve its reputation. The research question involved how effectively a major German airport communicated its commitment to sustainable corporate responsibility to its key stakeholders during 2005--2009. Of particular interest was how key stakeholders perceived the airport's stance towards the impacts of aircraft noise. Corporate documents, newspaper articles, and semistructured interviews comprised the data. Data analyses of documents and interviews included coding segments of texts on key words related to sustainable corporate responsibility. Pattern matching helped aggregate coded text segments into respective coherent and consistent corporate messages. Randomly selected newspaper articles on the airport under scrutiny were coded on a Likert-type scale on how favorably they covered what types of themes. Subsequent qualitative analyses of hand notes fabricated during the coding process revealed how positively journalists wrote about specific events. Results indicated that the airport officials effectively communicated to the airport's key stakeholders regarding economic contributions to public welfare, engagements in neighborhood projects, environmental protection, and noise abatement. Implications for positive social change include the potential for dialogues between the airport and its critical stakeholders that could, in turn, further the long-term friendly coexistence of the airport, its neighbors, and the community.

This dissertation works against the longstanding literary critical premise that aesthetics and ethics are at odds. I challenge this notion by foregrounding the verse of four nineteenth-century-born and Northeastern-based poets who unapologetically prioritize aesthetic perception and experience in their writing. These poets—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson, Olivia Ward Bush, and William Stanley Braithwaite—were well aware of the criticism politicians, social reformers, educators, business proponents, and even other writers leveled against the functional and ethical utility of poetry in an era when transatlantic industrial revolutions and innovations in manufacturing and transportation technology contributed to a national ethos that celebrated progress and productivity in the most concrete terms. These developments, coupled with moral and political divisions over slavery and the economic and psychic strain of a nationwide war that brought life’s precariousness into relief, spurred citizens to contemplate their sense of purpose in contexts ranging from the vocational to the existential. Writers and poets in particular faced continual pressures to defend the practical value of their work. What makes the four poets in this dissertation unparalleled, I suggest, is the way they challenge readers to revise and expand their understanding of the aesthetic by devoting poetic attention to unsettling and unsightly products and processes in the natural world. Moldering plant matter, heaps of manure, broom-ravaged spiderwebs, and fragments of driftwood; the kinds of waste and remains normally deemed indecorous for nineteenth-century verse become vibrant and arresting in the work of these poets. Yet while each poet approaches humble and neglected phenomena as worthy of aesthetic treatment, they do so without idealizing the unpalatable and disregarded subjects they portray in verse. The attention they devote to the abject—a witnessing they extrapolate from literal to human nature—is, as I show over the course of this dissertation, an ethical and political act. In addition to upholding the unsettling and unglamorous qualities of the natural subjects they honor, these poets also abstain from sentimentalizing the elements of lived experience that inform their writing, and refuse to downplay the often demanding process of poetic composition itself. While this dissertation’s insistence on regarding aspects of nature that nineteenth-century poetry has traditionally neglected is, in part, an ecocritical intervention, my project is also a call to dignify the artistic labors that reframe overlooked natural phenomena as worthy of aesthetic attention. To portray writing as work is to regard the craft as just as substantial and legitimate a pursuit as occupations whose effects are more straightforwardly measurable in practical terms. Indeed, each poet in this dissertation insists upon depicting poetic making as a labor that requires the same dexterity as the construction of an architectural structure and that has as dramatic and far-reaching effects as military and legislative developments. Far from posing an escapist diversion from the social and civic realities of their day, I argue, these poets frame aesthetic creation and experience as fundamental to human nature, especially during wartime and periods of political upheaval.

Walter Benjamin warned in 1940 of a certain inconspicuous threat to political thinking, not least of all to materialism, that takes progress as an historical norm. Implicit in this conception is what he describes as an empty continuum of time along which the prevailing tradition chronicles its own mythic development and drains everyday life of genuine historical experience. The myth of progressive history advances insidiously today in consumeristic and technocratic attempts at reconciling cultural imagery with organic nature. In this dissertation, I pursue the contradictions of such images as they crystallize around the natural history of twenty-first century commodity society, where promises of ecological remediation, sustainable urban development, and climate change mitigation have yet to introduce a true crisis of historical experience to the ongoing environmental crisis of capitalism. A more radical way of seeing the cultural representation of nature would, I argue, penetrate its mythic determination by market forces and bear witness to the natural-historical ruins and traces that constitute, in Benjamin's terms, a single "catastrophe" where others perceive historical continuity. I argue that Benjamin's critique of progress is instructive to interpreting those utopian dreams, ablaze in consumer life and technological fantasy, that recent decades of growing environmental concern have channeled into the recovery of an experience of the natural world. His dialectics of nature and alienated history confront the wish-image of organic abundance with the transience of its appropriated expression in the commodity-form. Drawing together this confrontation with a varied literature on collective memory, nature, and the city, I suggest that our poverty of experience is more than simply a technical, economic, or even ecological problem, but rather follows from the commodification of history itself. The goal of this work is to reflect upon the potentiality of communal politics that subsist not in rushing headlong into a progressive future but, as Benjamin urges, in reaching for the emergency brake on the runaway train of progress.