all a construction?

From the poststructuralist perspective presented in one of my doctoral classes two years before the completion of the bulk of this work, it seemed as though my sense of connection with Land was a complete social construction. My carefully prepared exploration of ecological identity (as I conceived of it at the time and presented in a seminar with a classmate) was critiqued as being essentialist. It seemed as though it was inappropriate for me to think of myself as having an ecological identity that was not simply the socially constructed performance of particular subjectivities available to me (see Davies, 2000b). In the context of the class, and much of the rest of my doctoral program, the word 'animism,' was beyond the thinkable, outside the limits of intelligibility (Britzman, 1995).