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Abstract
Ecoculture is an emerging focal concept reflecting the inextricability of nature and culture. It is applicable to and employed in many disciplines, yet it is rarely defined, cited, or interrogated, causing potential inconsistencies in scholarly operationalization. In the present analysis, I use Steven H. Chaffee's method of explication to develop an analytical review of ecoculture. I explore the primitive terms—ecology and culture—before assessing the scholarly use of the derived, compound term. I trace ecoculture across multiple disciplines, synthesizing operationalizations into one transdisciplinary theoretical framework. I find that ecoculture connotes interconnectedness and place relations, and has been critically operationalized in ways that problematize dominant human-centered ideologies, making it a productive scholarly frame that emphasizes the relationships between humans, their cultures, and their ecologies.
Contributor Notes
Melissa Michelle Parks is a Tanner Humanities Research Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. She is also a Field Education Facilitator at the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Education. Her research explores themes of nature-culture relations within environmental, intercultural, and science communication. She uses an ecological perspective for communication studies, seeking to illuminate transdisciplinary interconnections. ORCID