Lana Garcia

  • Ph.D. Student
  • ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Bio

Lana’s passion for research, teaching, and synergistic solutions to social and environmental issues led her to CU Boulder. She has 10 years of teaching experience, having began teaching her own classes while a master’s student at CU Denver, teaching full time at CU Denver upon graduation, and continuing to teach as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Boulder. Here, she is able to continue her theoretical research while also acquiring concrete means to improve community and environmental wellbeing. She lives in Englewood, CO where she serves on the city’s Sustainability Commission. She loves high alpine hiking with her husband and dog Hallie.

Research Interests

Lana’s research is centered at the intersection of:
  • environmental ethics
  • attention ethics
  • socially and environmentally beneficial urban planning
  • deliberative democracy
  • community resilience
She explores how greenspace can be multifunctional in terms of public and environmental health and community unification. Her focus is on how urban public greenspaces can be places where individuals connect to embodied contact with non-human nature and where social solidarity can be produced.
 
More specifically, Lana examines embodied environmental and attention ethics, ecological reflexivity, democratic sustainability deliberation, social infrastructure, and wellbeing theories and empirical evidence. She utilizes these frameworks to discover how Americans can move from social estrangement to solidarity through mechanisms that also connect them with non-human nature. Her current research interrogates how the experience of awe in greenspaces might contribute to the cultivation of paying attention to one’s environment and to others. It specifically investigates how awe can be a mechanism of self-transcendence. It asks whether infusing tactile and self-transcendent experiences – specifically that of awe in greenspace – into community group experience might nudge them to pay more attention to their own wellbeing, that of others, and that of the environment. 
 

Education

  • Master of Humanities, University of Colorado Denver
  • B.A., Philosophy, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Benjamin Hale