We found a body: The intrabody of human, technology, narrative and environment as postqualitative inquiry

This paper explores the potential for a mode of postqualitative inquiry as generative knowledge-affect by looking towards the practice-led in-progress intermedial project, We Found A Body. The project functions as a form of urban play in a way that decentres and reconstructs participants so that their bodies, their technology and the environment they ‘play’ in become intertwined. I use a posthumanist queer reading of performativity (Barad, 2003, 2011) coupled with an affect-focused study of world-making (Harris & Jones, 2019) alongside a politics of affect to analyse how We Found a Body, in its potential for intraaction of human, technology, narrative and environment, can reconfigure and intertwine bodies and matter in a dynamic and embodied way. I argue that creative intermedial practice can produce counternarratives where new modes of belonging within space and time exist, and where extended ways of being human are at play (Myers, 2020). This is a space where the artwork acts as a performative call to action where iterative materialisation creates an intrabody of the human and more-than-human and opens up future methods within postqualitative inquiry.

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.

School strike for climate are leading the way: how their people power strategies are generating distinctive pathways for leadership development

Since November 2018, Australian high school climate strikers have become leaders in the movement for climate action, giving rise to a new generation of young people who have learnt how to lead change. This article focuses on the question of leadership across social movements and in global youth movements. It then investigates the different forms of leadership emerging in School Striker for Climate (SS4C) through a qualitative survey of its leaders. We argue that leadership is multifaceted, shaped by the different strategies that movements use to engage people in collective action. We present three different people power strategies – mobilising, organising and playing by the rules – and explore how these different strategies generate varied pathways for leadership development. We identify the strengths and limits of each strategy, and we find that peer learning, mentoring, learning by doing, confrontation, reflective spaces and training are important leadership development tools. This article’s greatest strength comes from the positionally of us as researchers – two of us are student strikers, and the third is an active supporter, giving us a distinctively engaged perspective on a powerful movement for change.

Primary school education resources on conservation in New Zealand over-emphasise killing of non-native mammals

Guidelines for sustainability linked to the government-approved National Curriculum for education in New Zealand emphasise values of empathy and respect for all life. These instruct educators to discuss different values around sustainability and conservation. I reviewed educational resources published or endorsed by government agencies to determine compliance with these sustainability Guidelines. The resources reviewed promote the view that non-native mammals should be killed. Some resources go further in giving instructions to children on how to do this, and how to source kill traps. Children are provided with material designed to engender dislike towards non-native mammals, particularly possums. Resources conflate issues of conservation by tying it in with protection of tourism, ornamental plants and primary industries. This encouragement of killing in environmental educational resources appears unique to New Zealand. It is discussed in light of increasing evidence that performing or witnessing animal abuse is a causal factor for future violence towards human and non-human animals.

A physical education/environmental education nexus: Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum for a sense of belonging

Physical education (PE) is a site that brings categories of difference under erasure, presenting a wicked problem for how a sense of belonging is cultivated for all learners to foster physical activity, health and wellbeing across the lifespan. This article explores how, we, as two teachers of PE, turned to postqualitative and ‘new’ materialist inquiry to generate a sense of belonging within a PE/environmental education nexus. Taking up Karen Barad’s agential realism and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, we conceptualise this PE/environmental education nexus as a transdisciplinary approach to curriculum that enacts a knowing/being/thinking/doing between, and across, borders, boundaries, categories, fields and practices. We then show how this nexus was actualised in our teaching practices through two vignettes. As transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum are grounded in the lived, embodied and embedded (micro) politics of location, individuals are imbued with affective obligation to enact affirmative patterns of relating moment-to-moment. This means that a sense of belonging is always imminent, invented and co-created, bringing attention to situated obligations to enact good relations with ourselves, each other and wider planetary systems.

More learning, less activism: Narratives of childhood in Australian media representations of the School Strike for Climate

The School Strike for Climate campaign led to public discussion about children’s political participation. Children are generally excluded from formal political systems, however this campaign challenges mainstream attitudes that children are not sufficiently competent to participate in politics. This paper presents an analysis of Australian mainstream media representations of adult responses to the School Strike for Climate events held in Australia in March 2019. When analysed against theories of childhood, two primary narratives are reflected in what adults said about children’s participation in the campaign. Anticipatory narratives focus on children appropriately developing into adults, and are represented by the notion that strikers should be in school, be punished for missing school, and are ‘just kids’ who should not be listened to. Protectionist narratives seek to shelter children from adult matters, suggesting strikers were brainwashed and raising welfare concerns. Neither of these narratives regard children as citizens capable of political voice, despite these children acting prefiguratively to create a world in which their civic participation is valued. Social movement theories of prefiguration are also explored in this paper, providing a counter argument to suggestions that children have no political agency and should be excluded from activism and discussions regarding climate change.

Becoming-with fire and rainforest: Emergent curriculum and pedagogies for planetary wellbeing

In this paper we propose the concept of ‘becoming-with’ in relation to the experience of the catastrophic fires in the summer of 2019–2020 in Australia, and their implications for research into young children’s response to bushfires, and their learning about bushfire recovery, which resulted in the development of an arts-based project to explore emergent curriculum and pedagogies for planetary wellbeing. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising that ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’; and ‘Spatio-temporal relations’ as ‘not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities of events as encounters’ to theorise how ‘becoming-with’ fires enabled the development of emergent curriculum and pedagogies in an early learning centre, which can ultimately contribute to planetary wellbeing.