Attending to the broader wellbeing debates, this study examines the interplay between forest-based tourism practices and sustainability. It does so by building on Max Weber’s notion of disenchantment of the world to explore how planetary wellbeing can be cultivated through the commercial practice of forest bathing. In positioning the study within the Serbian context, we build on feminist new materialist ideas to explore the ways in which broken ties between postmodern humans and forests as our primordial home can be reclaimed through this tourism practice. Using the empirical data collected during two forest tours, we take the relational approach in our analysis of the meanings the forest tour attendees ascribed to their experiences. In extending scholarly understandings of the notion of sustainability, we discuss the ways of achieving planetary wellbeing through forest bathing and the potential of more-than-human entanglements to re-enchant the world. To conclude, we discreetly illuminate one way of reconceiving the idea of enchantment and encourage rethinking our everyday and tourist practices in disenchanted Anthropocene.
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The divide between us and the rest of nature has been attributed to various rootcauses: the growing disenchantment of the world, the loss of direct experience andlately the replacement of the real with simulations of it. Modernity's move away fromthe natural world has also generated countervailing movements, beginning with theRomantics and leading up to the manifold forms of environmental education in ourtimes. When we seek to reconnect to the natural world through an open-ended artistic process, what happens? In this thesis, Jan van Boeckel explores the kind of learning that takes place through arts-based environmental education.
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This research explores two processes: globalisation and regionalisation. They will be analysed by means of what the author calls the 'conceptual triangle': the mutual interdependence of politics, economy and society. This analysis will be undertaken from a cultural sociological perspective. This means, that especially the way people value and give meaning to the processes of globalisation and regionalisation - but also vice versa: how these processes influence the values and meaningful structures of people - are central to this study.
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