by Brad Brewster
PhD Dissertation. Completed in 2011. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Done under the supervision of Michael Mayerfeld Bell.
I survey a collection of pedagogical resources in environmental sociology, including syllabi, textbooks, readers, and... more
I survey a collection of pedagogical resources in environmental sociology, including syllabi, textbooks, readers, and handbooks, to show that what’s being taught and perpetuated as environmental sociology, via field-defining theories, is actually environmental macrosociology, leaving out the micro. I argue that pedagogical and theoretical problems follow from such one-sidedness. To correct for this imbalance, I turn to social psychological philosopher George Herbert Mead and microsociological theorist of everyday life Erving Goffman, reconstructing their theories in environmental terms. I show that, contrary to how Mead is often taught in sociology courses as well as how he is often portrayed in environmental sociology, Mead’s broad intellectual interests extended beyond social psychology to the natural world. In doing so, an “environmental Mead” is developed from his socio-environmental thought for a community psychology in environmental sociology. Then, beginning with a partly critical discussion of his view of animals, I move into discussions of how Mead's anti-dualistic philosophy creatively combined social and natural in various ways when it came to his view of objects, of mind, and of nature. Unlike Mead, Goffman was singularly and narrowly interested in everyday social interaction. The problem, then, was how to modify Goffman to environmental uses without losing the distinctive character of Goffman’s work. I address this by formulating a pragmatic construct for exporting Goffman to domains he himself had never been. Along the lines of this construct, then, an “environmental Goffman” is developed from his frame analysis for an environmental sociology of everyday life. I, then, explore applications of Mead and Goffman to fields in environmental studies or closely related to environmental sociology, namely, exploring Goffman’s dramaturgical, ritual, and interaction analysis in terms of community sociology and Mead’s holistic thought by comparison to ecosystem ecology. As a next logical step from the socially contextual, embedded approaches of the self in the community in Mead’s thought and of the self in the social situation in Goffman’s thought, I move up to the next level of analysis, the small group itself, to bring group dynamics into the environmental and conservation social sciences.
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