New Materialisms And Environmental Education

‘New materialisms’ refers to a broad, contemporary, and significant movement of thought across the social sciences and cultural studies which attempts to (re)turn to, renew, or create alternative philosophies of matter. Such philosophies spring from multiple sources but are in general an attempt to bring the indissolubility of the social and environmental more forcefully into our analytical frames and modes of inquiry and tackle a perceived over-reliance on discourse and language in the so-called post-modern era of philosophy and social science. This movement in thought is underlaid by, and meets up with, the climate and biodiversity crises and the nature of the human condition (and modes of learning or becoming), within the field of environmental education. This volume brings together academics working at differing intersections of environmental education and new materialisms, highlighting tensions, knots, and lines of flight across and for research, practice, and theory. As such this collection draws on multiple interpretations and streams of thought within new materialisms and demonstrates their significance for those engaging with environmental education policy, practice and research. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie

Practising Immanence: Living with Theory and Environmental Education makes creative contributions to both qualitative inquiry and environmental education by exploring how each of these ideas seep and fuse into one another, creating a space where methodology becomes pedagogy, and where each of these is already always environmental: indivisible with life. Clarke’s energising and innovative approach offers a challenge to conventional research practices and shows ways in which inquiry can be done differently. Drawing on new materialisms, affect theory and the practical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the book details the PhD journey of the author, merging stories and theory (and stories of theory) in the production of eight ‘haecceities’ – a philosophical concept which prioritises the thisness of a thing or event. This move allows a novel methodological approach whereby the haecceities act as sites of variation on the events of the book: the self as unstable and posthuman; the environment as everything (immanent) rather than as an overly romantic or a green version of nature; and the tensions that these moves create for ethical orientations in education, inquiry and life in the Anthropocene. Practising Immanence brings theory to life through a diffractively critical style and a unique approach to environmental pedagogic practice. This radical and vitalising book will be of interest to those inspired to explore environmental problems and inquiry with each other and to those drawn to creative-relational, narrative, embodied and post-qualitative approaches to research.

This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.

This book examines a performative environmental educational inquiry through a place-based eco-art project collaboratively undertaken with a class of grade 4-6 students around the lost streams of Vancouver. The resulting work explores the contradictions gathered in relation to the Western educational system and the encounter with “Other” (real and imaginary others), including the shifting and growing “self,” and an attempt to find and foster nourishing alliances for transforming environmental education. Drawing on the work of new materialist theorists Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, Adsit-Morris considers the co-constitutive materiality of human corporeality and nonhuman natures and provides useful tools for finding creative theoretical alternatives to the reductionist, representationalist, and dualistic practices of the Western metaphysics.

This timely book provides a starting point for critical analysis and discourse about the status of gendered perspectives in environmental education research. Through bringing together selected writings of Annette Gough, it documents the evolving discussions of gender in environmental education research since the mid-1990s, from its origins in putting women on the agenda through to women’s relationships with nature and ecofeminism, as well as writings that engage with queer theory, intersectionality, assemblages, new materialisms, posthumanism and the more-than-human. The book is both a collection of Annette Gough, and her collaborators, writings around these themes and her reflections on the transitions that have occurred in the field of environmental education related to gender since the late 1980s, as well as her deliberations on future directions. An important new addition to the World Library of Educationalists, this book foregrounds women, their environmental perspectives, and feminist and other gendered research, which have been marginalised for too long in environmental education.

This book is situated in the simultaneous thinking (theory) and doing (action) of posthumanist performativity and new materialist methodologies to bring forth a multitude of stories that demonstrate co-constituted and co-implicated worldmaking practices. It is written in response to the fact that our Earth is at a critical juncture. As atmospheric temperatures rise and cast unprecedented and wide-spread social and ecological crises across the planet, social and ecological injustices and threats cannot be separated from globalising, neoliberal, capitalist, and colonial discourses that proliferate through anthropocentric and humancentric logics. Manifesting in binary classifications that position the human as separate from the Earth, and dominant categories of the human in hierarchies of power, such logics homogenise and institutionalise the field of environmental education and result in an over-emphasis on instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic teaching and learning practices. Exploring the affects emerging within, and between, an assemblage comprising Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings, this book seeks to understand how the researcher makes sense of herself with/in the broader ecologies of the world; collaborative processes with an elementary-school teacher in Saskatchewan, Canada, as actualised through four co-created and co-implemented multisensory researcher/teacher enactments (Mindful Walking, Mapping Worlds, Eco-art Installation, and Photographic Encounters); and how the researcher/teacher organises themselves with Land-based pedagogies, environmental education curriculum policy, and wider discourses of Western education. This book does not propose a better way of teaching and learning in environmental education. Rather, showing how difference between categories is relationally bound, this book offers a conceptual (re)storying of human/Earth relationships in environmental education for social and ecological justice in these times of the Anthropocene.

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.