ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1171-4477

Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

7-13-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

School of Social Welfare

Program

Social Welfare

First Advisor

Loretta Pyles

Committee Members

Sarah Mountz, Rory Crath

Keywords

eco-social work, transformative change, contemplative practice, eco-feminisms, embodied methods, post-anthropocentric research

Subject Categories

Environmental Studies | Social Work | Transpersonal Psychology

Abstract

In an era of accelerating planetary crisis, social work is called to reimagine its theories, methods, and practices beyond anthropocentric frameworks that separate human wellbeing from the health of the Earth and its resplendent living systems. Working in the space of transformative eco-social work, a growing chorus of voices contends that eco-centric responses require broadening the scope of health, welfare, justice, and care to extend beyond the human, to include the more-than-human world upon which all life intimately depends—understandings resonant with Indigenous and other relational knowledge systems long marginalized by colonialist-capitalist-modernity. Drawing from eco-feminist, eco-queer, decolonial, and post-anthropocentric lineages of thought, this dissertation examines how contemplative and embodied practices function as critical onto-epistemic resources for cultivating planetary belonging, sustaining Earth-care, and supporting life-affirming imaginaries and forms of world-making. Using a critical phenomenological and arts-informed design, this study engaged nine Earth-care practitioners, including environmental educators, organizers, eco-ministers, sustainability scholars, and animal rehabilitators, all of whom maintain regular contemplative practices such as meditation, mindfulness, yoga, prayer, or tai chi. Through an integration of embodied interviewing, multimedia journaling, eco-somatic body mapping, and a parallel a/r/tographic inquiry and meaning-making process, this dissertation explores how participants experience, make sense of, and navigate the affective, somatic, moral, spiritual, and imaginal dimensions of caring for a wounded Earth. Across three interrelated papers, the findings illuminate that embodied modes of knowing, being, and relating function as a vital site of ecological connection and resilience; ecological emotions as situated, somatic, moral, and spiritually inflected responses to planetary harm; and future planetary health imaginaries as embodied and aesthetic practices of worlding otherwise. Together, the contributions from this dissertation advance transformative eco-social work thought, theory, and practice by offering a more holistic, post-anthropocentric account of how Earth-human relationality is disrupted, repaired, sustained, and re-storied through contemplative, embodied, and artistic/aesthetic practices. This study also offers methodological and pedagogical implications for expanding eco-social work research and education, supporting the continued development of innovative methods and holistic literacies that can help researchers, practitioners, educators, and students remain in responsible and response-able relation to ecological grief, precarity, multispecies kinship, and the urgent work of cultivating more just and regenerative futures for all bodies and beings, rooted in a place of radical love and fidelity with life itself.

License

This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.

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