Jessica Balling

Jessicas dissertation examines the production and socio-spatial contestation of nations through the practical mediation of nature conservation and cultural heritage in national parks (NPs), drawing on a practice-theoretical perspective of place. As this study shows NPs do not only take a major role in the perception of flora or fauna but remain central places to shape, manifest, and contest nations.

However, nations are not only shaped by state actors within the parks. Rather, they are continually enacted through everyday practices, such as hiking and mountaineering, the performance and presentation of cultural practices, visits to memorials and open-air museums, the interaction with and explanation of flora and fauna, as well as through the constructed physical-material environment, including the architectural design of elements in parks, and even through the movement and distribution patterns of animals and plants that inhabit them. Thus, the ways in which NPs, their nature conservation and cultural heritage are mediated, shaped, and experienced contribute significantly to the social and spatial configuration of nations. These practical modes of producing and negotiating nations are deeply inscribed in the bodily experiences, discursive practices and the material configurations of parks, but also in norms, objectives, and rules of the performance of these practices – an analytical perspective that has so far been insufficiently addressed, both conceptually and empirically.

To address this research gap, Jessicas dissertation develops a practice-theoretical perspective of place (Placing Nations) that allows (i) nations to be understood as bodily, materially, and discursively mediated; (ii) the rules, teleoaffective structures, and embodied competencies embedded in the presentation and experience of NPs to be made analytically accessible; and (iii) the dynamics of making places and therefore nations to be explored in terms of the stability and transformation of practices. From this conceptual lens of Placing Nations, a thick comparison of the re-/presentation and experience of two NPs – Triglav (Slovenia) and Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) – the dissertation reveals central aspects of the practical production and negotiation of nations:

Nationalizing nature thus shows how nations become attached to natural elements and landscapes through the experience of the parks, and how particular modes of presenting conservation can shape and manifest the understandings of nations. The aspect of forgetting to remember illustrates how understandings of nations are stabilized and even colonial aspects of nation-building reproduced by selectively making (in)visible the violence and conflict associated with nation-building processes through cultural heritage. At the same time, adapting cultural practices and their presentation shows that this dynamic can contribute to both the stabilization and transformation of national understandings, and to the mediation of hybrid understandings of nations. The de-/construction of territorial structures through nature further illustrate the permeability of national borders and the possible in-/stability of national identities. Finally, the chapter contesting nations demonstrates the dynamics and ambivalences of the presentation and experience of NPs, as practice perspective reveals that it can simultaneously produce both hybrid and exclusionary understandings of nation.

On an individual level, the dissertation also contributes to a deeper understanding of how Slovenia and Argentina are negotiated through NPs. In Triglav National Park, tensions are evident between the strengthening of Slovenia’s national identity and sovereignty, and the questioning of national belonging, the visibility of hybrid ways of living, and the dynamic nature of states. NP Tierra del Fuego is a place where colonial understandings of nations and demarcations are reproduced, for example in relation to Chile. However, it is also a place where indigenous epistemologies and hybrid understandings of nations and communities can flourish.

Beyond the cases, by applying practice-theoretical aspects, the dissertation contributes to a deeper conceptual understanding of how nations are (re)produced through places. At the same time, it enriches the field of national park research by introducing a contemporary, practice-oriented perspective on NPs as places that contribute to the (re)production and negotiation of nations – and ultimately provides new insights into how Slovenia and Argentina are negotiated as nations through the experience and (re)presentation of their national parks.

Keywords: Place | Placing, Nation, Social Practices, National Parks, Slovenia, Argentina