SEAE Research Seminar Series: Education in a more-than-human world: Radical relationality and thinking with rivers

You are invited to our next SEAE Seminar Series event on Wednesday, 10th July 2024.

The SEAE Research Centre Seminar Series promotes scholarly dialogue about transformational approaches that facilitate opportunities for profound change in education & research.

Abstract

Rivers have an allure, a gravitational pull that positions us in particular ways, that orients us towards them and can draw us downstream (Morse, 2014). But is this something that is in our heads? Or is this something that emerges from the topography? Maybe mind and river coalesce with the water, our thinking funnelled, as it flows towards the ocean? For me, I’m not just interested in rivers, I’m fascinated, enchanted. There is something outside myself that grabs hold and pulls me in. What is this draw? Macfarlane (2013) suggests that landscapes provide a habitat for particular modes of thinking. But there is something more here, a thread to keep pulling at. This presentation provides a partial unravelling of this thread, exploring thinking beyond the brain and processes of cognition that think with the world.

This project works with an emergent methodology of thinking with things (Jukes, 2023) to explore ideas of thinking with places, and in this case, riverscapes. ‘Thinking with’ implies skilfully extending our thinking beyond the brain, outside our skulls, and engaging external materials and entities in the co-constitution of thought. It acknowledges more-than-human relations in our surrounds and follows the flow of those relations. And in this way, the places we go matter – inescapably affecting the qualities and nature of thought. What might this mean for education in a more-than-human world? What might such considerations do in the face of ecological precarity?