New Stories to Live By: Campus Green Spaces and Multispecies Meaning-Making

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 7:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Roundtable Session 9: Student Learning and Development in College and Beyond

Abstract

This paper explores the evolving role of the university as a moral and cultural leader in a time of ecological crisis, secularization, and narrative collapse. Revisiting Hazel Barnes’s claim that the university has replaced the church as “guardian of conscience,” the study examines how students engage campus green spaces not merely as sites of leisure but as affective, symbolic, and more-than-human spaces of meaning-making. Drawing on existential philosophy, narrative theory, terror management theory, and ecological thought, the paper argues that students use green spaces to construct new cultural narratives and relational practices that address mortality, belonging, and care. In doing so, the university emerges as a site of imaginative, ethical, and multispecies transformation.

Author

• Steve 4. Tu, University of Toronto - OISE