Reclaiming Wildness with Visiting Scholar Jeanine Canty
Jeanine M. Canty, our visiting scholar in the fall of 2025, is a visionary whose groundbreaking work illuminates the profound connections between consciousness, thought, and our relationship with the natural world. Her teaching weaves together social justice, ecological wisdom, and transformation. As a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and guest professor at both Pacifica Graduate Institute and Naropa University, Jeanine has developed and shared her deep understanding of how mind and spirit intersect with ecological healing. Her acclaimed Nautilus Book Award-winning work Returning the Self to Nature: Undoing Our Collective Narcissism and Healing Our Planet, demonstrates how spiritual alienation from the earth creates the narcissistic patterns plaguing our society and social landscape.
Her integration of contemplative practice with rigorous scholarship—drawing from Buddhist philosophy and transformative learning—offers tools for expanding our worldviews to heal our inner landscapes and our planet.
Course Material
Invitation to Reclaiming Wildness
In this invitation to Finding Wildness, 2025 Visiting Scholar Jeanine M. Canty invites us to join her as she embarks on her residency. She offers a framework for her worldview, some of the projects she brought with her, and what she hoped to find during her residency.
Reclaiming Wildness: Introductory Lecture
Within this introductory talk with Fall 2025 Visiting Scholar Jeanine M. Canty, her first event in residence at The New School, we look at dualities within the western human’s psyche to reclaim our ecological and transpersonal identities and to access pathways for healing.
Bridging Mind and Nature
During this second event with Fall 2025 Visiting Scholar Jeanine Canty, we look at various notions of self—ecological, multicultural, and transpersonal—and engage in some experiences and reflections that embody this. Host Susan Grelock Yusem will be in conversation with Jeanine for the first hour, followed by a half hour of experiential work with Jeanine.
There Is a Field
In this concluding article from 2025 Visiting Scholar Jeanine M. Canty, Jeanine summarizes the synchronicities that happened during her residency, giving examples of how living in relationship with the phenomenal and transpersonal worlds allows for harmonious relationship with our more earth-based selves.
Jeanine M. Canty, PhD
Jeanine is a professor of transformative studies at CIIS, telecommuting from Boulder, Colorado. Formerly the chair of environmental studies at Naropa University, she continues to guest teach at Naropa and at Pacifica Graduate Institute. A lover of nature, justice, and contemplative practice, her teaching intersects issues of social and ecological justice, ecopsychology, and the process of worldview expansion and change. She is author of Returning the Self to Nature: Undoing Our Collective Narcissism and Healing Our Planet and her most recent edited book is an expanded, second edition of Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices (2025).