Doing Little Justices: Speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics

This paper develops a series of speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics that is responsive to the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. The paper is framed within a new materialist approach to environmental education, and specifically works to re-imagine the notion of justice in terms of performative gestures, multiplicities, processes, and speculative thought experiments. Drawing on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy in conjunction with recent new materialist thought, the paper proposes the concept of “doing little justices” as a way of enacting micropolitical interventions into everyday patterns of environmental thought, learning, sociality, and behaviour. The concept of “little justices” is further elaborated through the analysis of vignettes that problematise issues of climate change, human exceptionalism, ecological sovereignty, and environmental justice with university students in the fields of education and the philosophy of law. The paper concludes that an immanent ethics cannot be reduced to a set of predetermined values or prescriptions for environmental education, but should proceed through a speculative process of creative experimentation and negotiation in the pursuit of unforeseen openings and potentials for co-existence

A systematic review of climate change education: giving children and young people a ‘voice’ and a ‘hand’ in redressing climate change

The reality of anthropogenic climate change has been established ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ by leading scientists worldwide. Applying a systematic literature review process, we analysed existing literature from 1993 to 2014 regarding climate change education for children and young people, with the aim of identifying key areas for further research. While a number of studies have indicated that young people’s understandings of climate change are generally limited, erroneous and highly influenced by mass media, other studies suggest that didactic approaches to climate change education have been largely ineffectual in affecting students’ attitudes and behaviour. The review identifies the need for participatory, interdisciplinary, creative, and affect-driven approaches to climate change education, which to date have been largely missing from the literature. In conclusion, we call for the development of new forms of climate change education that directly involve young people in responding to the scientific, social, ethical, and political complexities of climate change

The invisible hand: designing curriculum in the afterward

This paper diffracts a curriculum design workshop via online collaboration of a collective emerging from that event. Through the workshop, involving theory, conceptual art, writing, photography and curriculum planning, and the subsequent sharing of words and images, we move beyond interrogating designs for future subjects to asking how the pedagogical imagination composes both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within ecologies continually transforming in the process of making. We complicate ‘delivery’ or ‘conduit’ metaphors of education and perceive ‘design’ in co-compositions of human and nonhuman elements, resisting stasis, resisting closure. This workshop paper positions design in the realm of the artist–activist, rather than that of the bureaucrat–technician, and shifts intentionality beyond the invisible and controlling hand of humanism, as curriculum design we might do in the afterwards, rejecting instrumentalism

Walking with Media: Towards a mixed reality pedagogy in university learning environments

Recently the fields of architecture, media studies, and education have begun to converge through the proliferation of mixed reality technologies and interfaces. This convergence is widely described as offering new opportunities for immersive, seamless, decentralised and environmentally distributed learning experiences. This chapter contributes to a growing body of research exploring the transformation of learning environments through distributed media networks, digital databases, and innovative pedagogical interventions. It develops a theoretical framework for researching the interconnections between the built environment, mixed reality technologies, and place-based learning experiences and pedagogies. The second part of the chapter focuses on the development of the CubeWalk network, which involved a series of site-specific architectural installations, digital interfaces, and pedagogical interventions on a university campus in NSW, Australia. Two case studies are presented which describe the co-design and evaluation of mixed reality tutorial walks across the university campus. Drawing together insights rendered through the case studies, the chapter offers a series of theoretical propositions for a ‘mixed reality pedagogy’ that is distributed across 21st century learning environments and media networks

Children of an Earth to Come: Speculative fiction, geophilosophy and climate change education research

Over the last three years, the Climate Change and Me project has mapped children and young people’s affective, creative and ontological relationships with climate change through an emergent and child-framed research methodology. The project has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers responding to the rapidly changing material conditions of the Anthropocene epoch. In this paper, we position speculative fiction as a mode of creative research which enabled the young researchers to inhabit possible climate change futures. This node of the Climate Change and Me research was initiated by co-author Jasmyne, who at the time was a year seven student at a local high school. Through an ongoing series of visual and textual posts on the project website, Jasmyne created an alternate world in which children develop mutant forces and bodily augmentations that enable them to resist social and environmental injustices. Drawing on these visual and textual entries in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, we consider ways that speculative fiction might offer new conceptual tools for a viral strain of climate change education that proliferates through aesthetic modes of expression

Site/Sight/Insight: Becoming a Socioecological Learner Through Collaborative Artmaking Practices

This chapter explores collaborative arts practices as critical and creative vehicles for assembling a figure of the socioecological learner. We focus on developing the sensorial and affective dimensions of learning through aesthetic engagements with place, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of the “larval subject”, “carte”, and “rhizome”. In doing so, we also forge connections with contemporary life sciences that reveal the permeability and plasticity of learning processes through dynamic interactions within developmental eco-systems. These conceptual and empirical resources inform our posthumanist methodological approach to collaborative arts practices, which we describe in terms of a c/a/r/tography. Through the collaborative production of “site/sight-specific” images and poetic texts, we seek to produce a generative and visually critical exposé, which locates the emergence of the socioecological learner within a “biosocial ecology of sensation”. This opens up a field of potentials for sensing, thinking, feeling, and learning through collective aesthetic engagements with more than human worlds

Inhuman forms of life: On art as a problem for post-qualitative research

Researchers navigating the ontological turn in educational research have increasingly looked to art as an alternative to conventional modes of qualitative inquiry. However, the rapprochement between art and post-qualitative research remains problematic. While some see this turn coinciding with established genealogies in arts-based research, others suggest that existing models of arts-based inquiry are largely incompatible with the radical onto-epistemological orientations associated with post-qualitative research. This paper argues that the integration of art into the social sciences is far from settled, while also offering a series of speculative propositions for an inhuman aesthetics that is responsive to the ontological turn. This inhuman theory of art is elaborated through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, and extended through an analysis of collaborative artworks produced by undergraduate visual art students. This leads to a consideration of how post-qualitative approaches might enable mutual activations between art, philosophy, and social research

Gender differences in the upward mobility of black managers: Double whammy or double advantage?

This study draws upon the theory and research on intraorganizational mobility to examine gender differences in the upward mobility of black managers. Results suggest that neither the “double whammy” assumptions nor the “double advantage” assumptions are accurate descriptions of the contemporary experience of black female managers in corporate America. Upward mobility rates were nearly identical for both gender groups. Other findings and the implications of the results for future research are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45590/1/11199_2004_Article_BF00289811.pd