1st Edition
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.
Preface
1. Introduction—Tensions, knots, and lines of flight: themes and directions of travel for new materialisms and environmental education
David A. G. Clarke and Jamie Mcphie
2. From action to intra-action? Agency, identity and ‘goals’ in a relational approach to climate change education
Blanche Verlie and CCR 15
3. Entangled threads and crafted meanings: students’ learning for sustainability in remake activities
Hanna Hofverberg
4. More-than-human stories: experimental co-productions in outdoor environmental education pedagogy
Scott Jukes and Ya Reeves
5. Informal environmental learning: the sustaining nature of daily child/water/dirt relations
Sarah Crinall and Margaret Somerville
6. What if schools were lively more-than-human agencements all along? Troubling environmental education with moldschools
Tuure Tammi
7. ‘An atmosphere, an air, a life:’ Deleuze, elemental media, and more-than-human environmental subjectification and education
Marcelina Piotrowski
8. Re-assembling environmental and sustainability education: orientations from New Materialism
Greg Mannion
9. Fieldnotes and situational analysis in environmental education research: experiments in new materialism
Andy Ruck and Greg Mannion
10. Doing little justices: speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics
David Rousell
11. Painting trees in the wind: socio-material ambiguity and sustainability politics in early childhood education with refugee children in Denmark
Nanna Jordt Jørgensen and Asger Martiny-Bruun
12. Challenging amnesias: re-collecting feminist new materialism/ecofeminism/climate/education
Annette Gough and Hilary Whitehouse
13. Anthropocentrism’s fluid binary
Ramsey Affifi
14. Dark pedagogy: speculative realism and environmental and sustainability education
Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard and Stefan Bengtsson
15. Dark places: environmental education research in a world of hyperobjects
Antti Saari and John Mullen
16. Environmental end game: ontos
Chris Beeman and Sean Blenkinsop
17. Words (are) matter: generating material-semiotic lines of flight in environmental education research assemblages (with a little help from SF)
Noel Gough and Chessa Adsit-Morris
18. Nature matters: diffracting a keystone concept of environmental education research – just for kicks
Jamie Mcphie and David A. G. Clarke
Biography
David A. G. Clarke lectures in Environmental Education at the University of Edinburgh (UK). He is a member of the University’s Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry (CCRI), and the Sustainability in Education Research Group (SIERG). His academic interests traverse education, creative inquiry, life experience, and ethics in the Anthropocene.
Jamie Mcphie's work traverses Health, Environmental Humanities, and Experiential Education. He is a co-theme lead for one of the Learning, Education and Development Research Centre themes based at the University of Cumbria (UK). His research interests include therapeutic landscapes, environmental ethics, contemporary animisms, posthumanism and psychogeography. He recently authored the book Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Anthropocene: A Posthuman Inquiry (2019).
