Browsing by Author "Coope, Jonathan"

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    How might Indigenous decolonization agendas inform Anthropocene historiography?
    (Routledge, 2021-11-11) Coope, Jonathan
    Many Indigenous and post-development commentators view the hegemony of western conceptions of “development” as profoundly implicated in the Anthropocene’s global ecological crises, and underpinned by modernity’s extractivist and anthropocentric worldview and sensibilities. Meanwhile, as Kothari et al note, secular modernity’s defenders persist in the presumption that modern science affords the definitive account of nature and reality, while the worldviews of Indigenous peoples are frequently delegitimised as unsophisticated or mere superstition. Accordingly, many Indigenous critics call for today’s Indigenous movements globally to challenge the dominance of western “heteropatriarchal” styles of thinking. They suggest modernity needs to learn from Indigenous movements and traditions, not least for insights into ethical relationality with the animate Earth. Likewise, Arturo Escobar insists contemporary academic “theory” needs re-enlivening: bringing it closer to life and the Earth, and to the work of those who struggle to defend them. This paper asks how Indigenous decolonization agendas, which struggle in defense of life and the Earth, might inform historiography in the Anthropocene. For example, Beverley Southgate has suggested history has a utopian and therapeutic purpose – helping us escape the thrall of the pasts and orientate ourselves towards emancipatory futures. This paper suggests – in an era of ecological emergency – history’s utopian imaginaries will need to be commensurate with that vivid experience of sensed ethical reciprocity with nature to which Indigenous traditional ecological knowledges (ITEK) bears witness. Some western historians question whether a coherent story for humanity is possible, given how systems thinking suggests global feedback and radical uncertainty condition our future. However, systems thinking also highlights the hierarchical nature of human-ecological systems, and suggests the deepest level for intervening in any human-ecological system is at the level of a society’s “mental models” and “worldview”. This is the level at which interventions have greatest leverage for radical system transformation and is the level this essay focuses upon.
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    How might Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (ITEK) inform ecopsychology?
    (Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 2019) Coope, Jonathan
    This article suggests several key lessons ecopsychology might learn from Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (ITEK). For example, second generation ecopsychology sought to remove the political radicalism and so-called “political correctness” that had been present throughout earlier versions of ecopsychology. But Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge reminds us that any such claims to be above politics can only ever be merely rhetorical; and are themselves deeply political. For ITEK reminds us that Western versions of ecopsychology are culturally situated and deeply embedded within the profoundly destructive cultures of techno-scientific modernity. This paper suggests that ITEK may offer to environmental psychologies (including some versions of ecopsychology) a counsel of profound humility, inviting recognition of the need to acknowledge not only scientific styles of psychological knowledge but also the aesthetic and sacramental dimensions of a post-secular animism. In striving to be “tough-minded” or rigorous, secular environmental psychologists have often warned against dangers of “eco-mysticism” and of romanticizing Indigenous or nonmodern cultures. This paper argues that such warnings, however well-intentioned, run the risk of unconsciously perpetuating cultural imperialism. ITEK may offer a way of radically, but usefully, re-storying modernity in a manner that may be profoundly useful to those climate change and other environmental campaigners who are now seeking a post-secular environmental psychology that moves from facts to emotion, from the head to the heart. Given the urgency of our current environmental predicaments, such re-storying and re-framing may be timely.
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    Idioms of resilience: Mental health and migration in India
    (Sage, 2021-08-31) Raghavan, Raghu; Brown, Brian J.; Coope, Jonathan; Crossley, Mark; Sivakami, Muthusamy; Gawde, Nilesh; Pendse, Tejasi; Jamwal, Saba; Barrett, Andy; Dyalchand, Ashok; Chaturvedi, Santosh; Chowdary, Abijeet; Heblikar, Dhanashree
    Background: Resilience has proved to be a versatile notion to explain why people are not defeated by hardship and adversity, yet so far, we know little of how it might apply to communities and cultures in low to middle income countries. Aim: This paper aims to explore the notion of resilience in cross-cultural context through considering the lived experience of internal migration. Methods: A sample of 30 participants with experience of migration was recruited from a low-income slum dwelling neighbourhood in the city of Pune, India. These individuals participated in biographical narrative interviews in which they were encouraged to talk about their experience of migration, their adaptation to life in their new environment and making new lives for themselves. Results: Participants referred to a variety of intra-individual and external factors that sustained their resilience, including acceptance of their circumstances, the importance of memory, hope for their children’s futures as well as kindness from family friends and community members and aspects of the physical environment which were conducive to an improvement in their lives. Conclusions: By analogy with the widely used term ‘idioms of distress’, we advocate attention to the locally nuanced and culturally inflected ‘idioms of resilience’ or ‘eudaemonic idioms’ which are of crucial importance as migration and movement become ever more prominent in discussions of human problems. The nature and extent of people’s coping abilities, their aspirations and strategies for tackling adversity, their idioms of resilience and eudaemonic repertoires merit attention so that services can genuinely support their adjustment and progress in their new-found circumstances.
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    Indigenous knowledge and techno-scientific modernity: ‘hierarchical integration’ reconsidered
    (Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 2020) Coope, Jonathan
    With growing awareness of the urgent need for action on environmental problems, increasing attention is being given to how wisdom traditions and Indigenous cultures might usefully inform and engage with western scientific knowledge. However, a significant barrier to this for many western scholars – including environmental scholars – remains the problem of scientism: the assumption that western science offers the definitive account of nature and reality. This paper seeks to re-examine one approach to tackling the problem, developed by Abraham Maslow and Theodore Roszak in the 1960s and 1970s. To address the problem of scientism, these authors developed the idea of ‘hierarchical integration’: a project that seeks to harmoniously and psychologically integrate modern scientific knowledge with other knowledge styles. In its mature form, it suggests that while western scientific styles of knowledge undoubtedly provide invaluable information about the natural world, modern science requires integration within a much grander conception of knowledge and reality that also encompasses a magical apprehension of nature: that experienced reciprocity and felt ethical relationship with the animate Earth to which Indigenous and wisdom traditions have long borne witness. It is suggested that among many Indigenous people and cultures such experienced relations and sense of ethical reciprocity with the Earth have tended not to be so ruthlessly severed or diminished as they have been among many people in western modernity. Hierarchical integration offers insights into the problem of scientism e.g. by proposing that when scientific objectivity monopolizes people’s conceptions of knowledge at the expense of other experiential modes of knowing, then science becomes a cognitive pathology: a neurotic flaw that not only vitiates the humane potentials of western science but which may also be profoundly implicated in ecocide and the rape of the Earth.
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    On the need for an ecologically dimensioned medical humanities
    (BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & Institute of Medical Ethics, 2020) Coope, Jonathan
    Increasing calls from medical professionals and scholars suggest an urgent need for better and more widespread understandings of the ecological dimensions of health. Such calls have included: two recent Lancet special commissions on impacts of climate change on health; and recognition by senior figures from the WHO and UN of relationships between human impacts on the natural world and disease pandemics, with some suggesting prevention of future pandemics may require a radical reassessment of modernity’s relationship with the natural world. Among the medical humanities as a whole, however, calls for better and more widespread understandings of the ecological dimensions of health have not always been as prominent, or urgently expressed, as they might be. This paper, which presumes there is an urgent need for better and more widespread understandings of the ecological dimensions of human health, draws on ecological public health and other models to propose an ecological re-visioning of our conceptions of health and medical humanities; and in ways that challenge some contemporary assumptions about health, well-being and the “good society”. Indeed, once we begin to heed what ecocritic Tim Morton terms “the ecological thought”, we may discover few areas of healthcare and the humanities remain untouched by its implications. With growing recognition that the fate of global human health and the fate of the biosphere are inextricably entwined, the project of a more ecologically dimensioned medical humanities appears both timely and urgent. Such a project may represent a significant opportunity for the medical humanities, but also a significant responsibility.
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    Resilience, mental health and urban migrants: a narrative review
    (Emerald, 2020-05-21) Coope, Jonathan; Barrett, Andy; Brown, Brian J.; Crossley, Mark; Sivakami, Muthusamy; Raghavan, Raghu
    The purpose of this paper is to provide a narrative review of the literature on mental health resilience and other positive mental health capacities of urban and internal migrants. The methodology for this narrative review included a search of articles published up to 2017. The abstracts were screened and relevant articles studied and discussed. Literature on the particular mental health challenges of urban migrants in India was also studied. References found in the literature relating to neuro-urbanism were also followed up to explore broader historical and conceptual contexts. Several key sources and resources for mental health resilience were identified – including familial and community networks and individual hope or optimism. Nevertheless, much of the literature tends to focus at the level of the individual person, even though ecological systems theory would suggest that mental health resilience is better understood as multi-layered i.e. relevant to, and impacted by, communities and broader societal and environmental contexts. This paper provides insight into an aspect of migrant mental health that has tended to be overlooked hitherto: the mental health resilience and positive mental health capacities of urban migrants. This is particularly relevant where professional ‘expert’ mental health provision for internal migrant communities is absent or unaffordable. Previous work has tended to focus predominantly on mental health risk factors, despite growing awareness that focusing on risk factors along can lead to an over-reliance on top-down expert-led interventions and overlook positive capacities for mental health that are sometimes possessed by individuals and their communities.