WWOOFing Nature: A Post-Critical Ethnographic Study
Yoshifumi Nakagawa
10.4225/03/58a385fdf1e7f
https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/WWOOFing_Nature_A_Post-Critical_Ethnographic_Study/4652629
<i>What is
WWOOFers’ nature experience?</i> This sociologically oriented post-critical
ethnographic study of ten international WWOOFers (i.e. participants in Willing
Workers On Organic Farms) in Australia investigates the overarching research
problem of developing rich empirically-driven interpretations, conceptual
understandings, and theoretical explanations of ‘nature experience’. The study
is situated within the overlapping fields of ecotourism studies and
environmental education. A limited yet needed representation of WWOOFers’
nature experience will advance the interdisciplinary knowledge of how
participants’ experiential meaning- making and informal environmental learning
locally occurs in embodied relation to nature within globalising ecotourism
phenomena. <br>
<br>
In order to engage appropriately with the complex notions of
‘nature’ and ‘experience’, the research problem of ‘nature experience’ is
ecophenomenologically disaggregated into three interrelated research questions:
(RQ1) What is the WWOOFers’ <i>experience of nature?</i>; (RQ2) What is the <i>natur</i><i></i><i>e</i> of
their <i>experience?</i>; and (RQ3) What are the ecopedagogical <i>relations</i> between the
two? <br>
<br>
From a post-critical standpoint, WWOOFing may be represented
as an ‘alternative’ tourism experience, but, on rich ethnographic and
phenomenological investigation, it may also include other experiential layers
shaped by a wider range of humans and other than humans in the environment. In
order to access, represent, and explain this ontological complexity of the
layered realities of WWOOFers’ nature experience, if only partially and
contingently, this study (meta-)methodologically employs an interrelated levels
of analysis approach to sociologically complex inquiry. There, how the
phenomenon of WWOOFing is constituted is investigated through a series of
analytical processes that are sensitive to increasing levels of epistemological
abstraction, consisting of ethnographic description, hermeneutic
phenomenological interpretation, socio-ecological analysis, and
poststructuralist (de)theorisation. <br>
<br>
The ethnographic fieldwork of approximately 50 days/nights
was conducted over a four-month period in 2014 at five geographically and
socio-culturally diverse rural WWOOF sites in the State of Victoria, Australia.
The ten international WWOOFers who participated in this study consisted of
three Britons, three Germans, two Italians, one South Korean, and one
Taiwanese. As a researcher/WWOOFer, I spent approximately one week with each
research participant on-site, not only observing and interviewing them, but
also working and living with them. <br>
<br>
A major finding of this study confirms the significance of
the ‘alternative’ in WWOOFers’ nature experience while indicating that it is
accompanied and challenged by other types of nature-human relations. In doing
so, this study destabilises the assumed anthropocentric understanding and
practice of what nature is (or should be). With this key finding, amongst many
others, this study recommends a post-critical and less anthropocentric framing
of the researched in and with nature so as to inquire into multiple aspects of
nature-human relations relevant to educative nature experience.
2017-02-14 22:34:35
WWOOF
Nature
Experience
Post-critical qualitative methodology
Ecopedagogy
Education