Nature - autonomous learning

170 de-naturalisationnaturalism has been so strong among left-wing geographers that they havefelt disinclined to moralise about nature, even within a social-constructivistframework. Overall, geography’s ‘social’ and ‘cultural left’ has outgunnedits barely existing ‘green left’ – notwithstanding the efforts of some (likeGavin Bridge) to take seriously the environmental impacts of humanaction.In the fourth place, those social-constructivist geographers who arepreoccupied with people’s identity and corporeality (rather than ‘externalnature’) tend to be moral pluralists. Their critique of moral naturalismis designed to valorise identities and bodily practices that have beenstigmatised by their classification as ‘unnatural’. For instance, criticalgeographers studying the physically and mentally disabled have advocatedthe so-called ‘social’ explanation of disability over the ‘medical’ one.Theyhave shown that the stigmatisation of disabled people is not simplya result of their objective differences from ‘able’-minded and -bodiedindividuals. Rather, it is also the result of the socially entrenched attitudesused to make sense of disabilities.Thus, by challenging the idea that disabledpeople’s role in society is prescribed by their physical condition, manycritical geographers have created a moral space where the needs, rightsand entitlements of the disabled can be placed on a par with those ofeveryone else in society (see Imrie 1996).Taking this further, several otherleft-wing geographers have used the denaturalisation of subjectivity andcorporeality to demonstrate the diversity of moral agendas within seeminglyunified groups (like women or people of colour). For instance,‘secondwave’feminist geographers have questioned the idea that women’s biologyand psychology is similar or universally shared by accenting the diverseways that people classified as women think and act. These feministsshow how women are interpellated within multiple discourses (of gender,‘race’, class etc.) such that their moral values and aspirations vary agreat deal (Pratt and Hanson 1994). In this sense, their research is ‘antiessentialist’:it maintains that ‘what essentialists “naturalize” . . . is actuallysocially constructed difference’ (Valentine 2001: 19).Finally, the practical implications of social constructivists’ argumentsare potentially profound for those phenomena that constructivists wishto de-naturalise. In Chapter 1 we learnt that one of the principal meaningsof the term nature is ‘the essence of something’. If a person’s mind orbody, or the non-human world, has an essence then it would appear to bea relatively fixed and unalterable aspect of the phenomenon in question.