From places to paths: learning for sustainability, teacher education and a philosophy of becoming

The purpose of this paper is to explore what thinking with a philosophy of ‘becoming’ might produce in terms of conceptualising Learning for Sustainability (LfS), a recent development in Scottish educational policy. The paper posits that animism and the immanent materiality of a philosophy of becoming have important ramifications for contemporary approaches to sustainability education. ‘Becoming’ is described and its relationship to prevailing ‘systemic’ approaches to sustainability education explained. LfS is then described and conceptualised with a philosophy of becoming by examining its implications for Education for Global Citizenship and Outdoor Learning. The concepts of communication as expression; the subject undone (as haecceity); the distinction of ‘nature’ as ‘other’; and the centrality of a storied world are discussed as important elements of LfS becoming. Lastly, teaching materials and interviews with two initial teacher educators help create a rhizomatic assemblage of teacher education practice and LfS as becoming. This assemblage creates lines of flight for considering practice, including making explicit the expressivity of communication in course descriptor/teaching/learning relationships; highlighting the place/becoming assemblages of ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ learning environments; and storying the world with learners through haecceity description/experimentation

Tensions, knots, and lines of flight:Themes and directions of travel for new materialisms and environmental education

In this introduction to a special issue of Environmental Education Research on New Materialisms and Environmental Education, we begin with a brief overview to this publishing project and to scholarship on new materialisms and environmental education. Against this backdrop, we then discuss various themes of significance arising from the broader tumult of thought that occurs in the 17 papers that bring these areas into conversation. In brief, papers gathered in this collection illustrate a series of engagements with: (1) new empiricism and post-qualitative inquiry; (2) the meeting of politics, ethics, and decolonial theory with new materialisms; (3) conceptions of nature, environment, sustainability and the human subject; and (4) new materialisms as environmental pedagogy. We recognise that readers will imagine, detect and respond in diverse ways to the papers and the thematics on their own terms too, noting that other inclusions in the collection would likely have generated different patterns and affordances for insight, challenge and debate. Thus, we argue that in some senses, the collection must remain open rather than closed, while we also invite further contributions on the topics, that engage with what the collection does and does not offer, and to rework it. In other words, we trust our introduction underscores the immanent performativity expected of many of the new materialisms, and highlights their potential to forge axiological pathways away from dominant onto-epistemologies of environmental education research

Nature matters: diffracting a keystone concept of environmental education research – just for kicks

As a keystone species the concept ‘nature’ plays a vital role in shaping our world. In this article, we think with the material turn about the concept nature due to its significant performativity in its role within environmental education and research. How nature is conceived is played out on a massive scale as matter itself is morphed through conceptual processes. Therefore, we focus on the matter(ing) of conceptual abstraction, the physical effects – and affects – of thinking a thing into existence. We initiate a pluralistic thought experiment that purposefully diffracts nature into eight performances, to see what it does. The concept nature performs ecologically and enacts trophic cascades. This exploration highlights feats of racism, classism, androcentrism, colonialism, homogenization, and mass extinction. What we are proposing is an environmental literacy that attends to what a concept is capable of, what a concept can do, and perhaps even what a concept can prevent, post-nature

Call for proposals for a special issue: New materialisms and environmental education

The purpose of this special issue is to: acknowledge the emergence of new materialisms in environmental education research and articulate the potential significance of new materialisms for debates in environmental education research, policy, and practice; to encourage engagement with debates concerning materiality and ontology occurring in the broader theoretical and research landscape; to consider what might arise in the coming together of new materialist theories and the hopes, intentions and purposes of the field of environmental education and environmental education practitioners and scholars. Overview of the special issue: In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency & Politics, Coole and Frost (2010) argue that contemporary environmental, economic, geopolitical, and technological developments require novel articulations of nature, agency, and social and political relationships, and that means of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not sufficient for the task. New materialisms, a term that covers diverse theories, generally posit that the social sciences in the last several decades have paid particular attention to subjectivity at the expense of considering matter due to a perceived inaccessibility of the material world. New materialist theories attempt to take up the ostensibly neglected philosophy of matter by finding new means to express the ways in which the world relates to itself. New materialisms, for example, ask questions about what agency is and where it is located; the relationship between matter and discourse; the axiomatic distinctions between what is ‘natural’ and what is human or human derived; as well as the possibilities of expanding the concept of ‘life’ beyond the solely organic, as in Jane Bennett’s (2009) vibrant materialism and materially informed contemporary animism (Harvey, 2013)

Post-qualitative inquiry in outdoor studies: a radical (non-)methodology

In this chapter we borrow from St. Pierre (2014) to tell a brief and personal history of engagements with research from our undergraduate studies to our present doctoral research and beyond, drawing on each other’s narratives to think ‘through’ various paradigms/turns of thought. Sandwiched in-between the introduction and the conclusion, we generate a brief conversation between us (the authors), relevant scholars and you (the new author), to example an(other) stimulating development in academic research/thinking. It is a creative endeavour as we attempt to generate a style of writing/thinking that is reminiscent of research currently being labelled as post-qualitative inquiry

Causes of breakage and disruption in a homogeniser

Many authors have written in the past regarding the exact causes of breakage and disruption in a high pressure homogeniser, but there has been little agreement. This paper investigates some of the most likely causes of the rupture of the walls of unicellular organisms and offers suggestions obtained from various papers and work carried out

Probe-configuration dependent dephasing in a mesoscopic interferometer

Dephasing in a ballistic four-terminal Aharonov-Bohm geometry due to charge and voltage fluctuations is investigated. Treating two terminals as voltage probes, we find a strong dependence of the dephasing rate on the probe configuration in agreement with a recent experiment by Kobayashi et al. (J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 71, 2094 (2002)). Voltage fluctuations in the measurement circuit are shown to be the source of the configuration dependence.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell state in quasi-one-dimensional superconductors

The properties of a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) superconductor with {\it an open Fermi surface} are expected to be unusual in a magnetic field. On the one hand, the quasi-1D structure of the Fermi surface strongly favors the formation of a non-uniform state (Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell (LOFF) state) in the presence of a magnetic field acting on the electron spins. On the other hand, a magnetic field acting on an open Fermi surface induces a dimensional crossover by confining the electronic wave-functions wave-functions along the chains of highest conductivity, which results in a divergence of the orbital critical field and in a stabilization at low temperature of a cascade of superconducting phases separated by first order transistions. In this paper, we study the phase diagram as a function of the anisotropy. We discuss in details the experimental situation in the quasi-1D organic conductors of the Bechgaard salts family and argue that they appear as good candidates for the observation of the LOFF state, provided that their anisotropy is large enough. Recent experiments on the organic quasi-1D superconductor (TMTSF)$_2$ClO$_4$ are in agreement with the results obtained in this paper and could be interpreted as a signature of a high-field superconducting phase. We also point out the possibility to observe a LOFF state in some quasi-2D organic superconductors.Comment: 24 pages+17 figures (upon request), RevTex, ORSAY-LPS-24109