Abstract: Navigating emotional attachments in anthropogenic landscapes
Anthropogenic landscape change, from extractive industries such as mining to renewable energy transitions, reshapes how people experience and emotionally relate to place. This seminar positions emotional attachment as a critical force in navigating processes
of landscape transformation. I argue that place attachment is not a static sentiment but, under conditions of anthropogenic change, emerges as an ongoing narrative and affective practice through which individuals and communities negotiate their relationships
with disrupted environments and imagine future possibilities.
To advance this argument, I primarily draw on two studies of people–place relations in anthropogenic landscapes: the first examines post-mining landscapes, and the second focuses on a landscape undergoing the expansion of renewable energy technologies. Together,
these studies highlight how emotional attachments are actively re-worked as a foundation for community resilience amid landscape change and shifting socio-ecological futures.
Marianna Strzelecka is Associate Professor at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her current work draws on political science, sociology, environmental
psychology, and political ecology to examine the socio-cultural dimensions of human–nature relationships in leisure and tourism contexts. At the community level, she investigates how tourism transforms the social fabric of rural communities and how these communities
construct and relate to their surrounding. At the individual level, her research explores how leisure and travel shape connections to nature, with place attachment and other relational values of nature becoming increasingly central to her work.
She is visiting University of Oulu through the Resilience Oulu Academy Mobility (ROAM) programme funded by the FRONT Profi7 research programme and is hosted by Dr Bailey Adie from the Geography Research Unit, Faculty of Science, University of Oulu.
She is visiting University of Oulu through the Resilience Oulu Academy Mobility (ROAM) programme funded by the FRONT Profi7 research programme and is hosted by Dr Bailey Adie from the Geography Research Unit, Faculty of Science, University of Oulu.