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

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

Mental health and wellbeing in the Anthropocene: a posthuman inquiry

This book makes the unorthodox claim that there is no such thing as mental health. It also deglamourises nature-based psychotherapies, deconstructs therapeutic landscapes and redefines mental health and wellbeing as an ecological process distributed in the environment – rather than a psychological manifestation trapped within the mind of a human subject. Traditional and contemporary philosophies are merged with new science of the mind as each chapter progressively examples a posthuman account of mental health as physically dispersed amongst things – emoji, photos, tattoos, graffiti, cities, mountains – in this precarious time labelled the Anthropocene. Utilising experimental walks, play scripts and creative research techniques, this book disrupts traditional notions of the subjective self, resulting in an Extended Body Hypothesis – a pathway for alternative narratives of human-environment relations to flourish more ethically. This transdisciplinary inquiry will appeal to anyone interested in non-classificatory accounts of mental health, particularly concerning areas of social and environmental equity – post-nature

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

Speculative fabulations in the ruins of colonial topographies: a (messy) review of ‘developing place-responsive pedagogy in outdoor environmental education: a rhizomatic curriculum autobiography’: by Alistair Stewart.

There are fundamental differences between the various ontologies of Australian First Nations peoples who have lived there for 40-60,000 years and the various ontologies of more recent Australian arrivals from the 18th Century onwards (peoples of European descent or Asian descent, for example)

The wisp of an outline ≈ Storying ontology as environmental inquiry↔education :–)

They thought they felt something, perhaps. The wisp of an outline not distinct enough to trace. Good. They circled it, at times, and at other times found themselves within. As they walked (a sort of walking. Figurative but real. Digital, but here. Over months of events), it curled open and headed in several directions. Foldings in the backcloth that furrowed them along until, as they walked and talked, they felt that perhaps a territory was becoming simultaneously clearer and more obscure, that they might find a way to enquire, even as it meant becoming the folds themselves. As they coalesce, Scott, Jamie, and Dave each come to this project differently (of course). From their own situations, with their own problems and with different voices and ways of writing. We (for the first shift in voice) take post-qualitative inquiry to be infused with a question mark, wary of attempts to make it a ‘thing’. Yet here we are, drawn to potentials, to the opening of conditions, to the possibility of something still to come. We hope to make a shift, to realise (as in make manifest) ontology and its everyday performance as synonymous with environmental education. Environmental education as a life

The accidental death of Mr. Happy: a post-qualitative rhizoanalysis of mental health and wellbeing

There is a growing body of evidence indicating that anxiety, stress and mental ill-health are becoming more prevalent in modern Western societies. At the same time, climate change and mass extinction have now taken root in a period of the earth’s history that has been labelled, ‘the Anthropocene’ and/or ‘Capitalocene’. Some academics have related these various issues to a ‘crisis of perception’ and a general nature-culture perceptual misalignment. This thesis/play is a deconstruction and (re)construction of human-environment conceptions in relation to mental health and wellbeing. More precisely, it is an attempt to map ‘the spread mind’ in ‘environ(mental) health’ (Mcphie, 2014a). (Intra-)Act 1 is an exploration of the performativity of particular Euclidean concepts as well as post-Enlightenment environmental and psychotherapeutic paradigms, with a particular emphasis on those that purport an innate connection with nature. The act also (re)views models that measure mental health as an objectified or subjectified essence within an anthropocentrically idealised self. By taking this approach, I highlight the distinct move in Western culture from an ontology of immanence to one of transcendence. (Intra-)Act 2 invites you to think with a post-qualitative collaborative action (re)search, using psychogeography and rhizoanalysis to map the temporal assemblages of six people-environments (a multiplicity), each with a specific diagnosed mental health concern, in order to explore how mental health and wellbeing is a distributed process. (Intra-)Act 3 and the assemblages present the rhizoanalyses in the form of (re)presentational experimentation including, Brechtian playwriting and assemblages of mental health. By thinking with a troika of emerging contemporary process-relational ontologies, I propose an alternative post-psychotherapeutic pathway for how we might conceive of mental health and wellbeing. This attempt emphasises the intra-relational co-production of material agency and is (re)presented in this study as a process distributed of the environment. This is not a conclusion