SEAE Seminar Series

our “brilliant” children how to read before they can talk to enrolling them in the most costly daycares, the aim can never be said to be only teaching them how to learn. The aim is to organize them into the docility of knowing, into its posture. Neurotypicality names not the person, but the systemic operation that polices a certain modality of knowing and being. Education’s investment is in neurotypicality. Education’s primary investment is in the belief that those who occupy knowledge do so “naturally.” This is whiteness.

This talk will explore education from the perspective of the surplus-value of life that defies, and deviates whiteness. I will ask what else resistance can be if it is not a refusal mapped in the very logic from which it seeks to deviate. A logic of approximation of proximity through which blackness and neurodiversity co-compose will lead the way.

Biography

Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, forthcoming), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014)

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?  
 
References
 
Jukes, S. (2023). Emergent environmental education inquiry: A methodology of thinking with things. In: White, P., Tytler, R., Ferguson, J., & Cripps Clark., J. (Eds) Contemporary Approaches to Research in Mathematics, Science, Health & Environmental Education Volume 4 – Chapter 11 pp. 249-266. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Macfarlane, R. (2013). The old ways: A journey on foot. London: Penguin.
Morse, M. (2014). A quality of interrelating: describing a form of meaningful experience on a wilderness river journey. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 14:1, 42-55, DOI: 10.1080/14729679.2013.769713

Biography

Scott Jukes is a lecturer in Outdoor and Environmental Education at Federation University. Always drawn to rivers and mountains, Scott loves sharing his love for these places in his teaching and research. His research deploys relational and post-anthropocentric approaches for developing pedagogies which grapple with environmental problems. Scott recently authored the book Learning to confront ecological precarity: Engaging with more-than-human worlds. He also recently received a Vice-Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching Award for his development of innovative place-responsive curricula which enhanced student learning and experience.

Abstract

Our seminar will discuss how and why gender and environment needs to be repositioned in education, taking up ideas presented within the special issue, in some of our previous writing together, and in recent reports. We will also discuss the questions we would still like to see answered, which will help reposition gender and environment in education in more productive ways in the highly uncertain present/future.   

Biography

Annette Gough OAM is Professor Emerita of Science and Environmental Education in the School of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She has been an adjunct and visiting professor at universities in Canada, South Africa, and Hong Kong, and is a Life Fellow of the Australian Association for Environmental Education (since 1992). She is author of Gender and environmental education: Feminist and other(ed) perspectives (Routledge 2024) and Education and the environment: Policy, trends and the problems of marginalisation (ACER 1997), and co-editor of Green schools globally: Stories of impact on education for sustainable development (Springer 2020) among many other publications. Her research interests span environmental, sustainability and science education, research methodologies, posthuman and gender studies.

Hilary Whitehouse is an adjunct Associate Professor with The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, and a life member of the Australian Association for Environmental Education. Before retirement she worked as a teacher educator and as the Deputy Dean of the Graduate Research School. She is known for her scholarship on gender, climate change education, anti-extinction education, and sustainability education. She is a long serving editor with The Journal of Environmental Education and an editor with the Australian Journal of Environmental Education. She currently volunteers her time with a small, conservation and education not-for profit, The Bats and Trees Society of Cairns.

Abstract

The path establishes a territory. It animates thought through the connections that it affords: with other texts, with inchoate ideas, with matter, with memories. To read in this mode is to construct an assemblage. Deleuze recalls an exchange between Jung and Freud, in which Jung related a dream of walking through an ossuary. While Freud insistently focuses on what a single bone would “mean” within the Oedipal logic of analysis, Jung insists on the significance of the ossuary as a multiplicity, through which desire flows. The real question, Deleuze asserts, is this: “Where does my desire pass among these thousand cracks, these thousand bones?” (Deleuze, 1996; emphasis added). The path that is carved through the library in reading for research can be understood, I think, in similar terms: as a passage among a thousand possible cracks, a thousand books, a thousand connections. We cannot entirely predict or control the path, and we never simply choose it: the adventure of reading, like that of thinking, relies on the conjoint operation of necessity and chance if it is to produce something new. I look back on some ways that reading has infused and infected my research over the decades.

Biography

Maggie MacLure is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Health and Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her interests include theory and methodology in qualitative inquiry, and early childhood research. She is Founder-Director of the international Summer Institute in Qualitative Research.

to conduct research-creation projects are aligned with what has been dubbed the feminist materialisms. Specifically, a feminist orientation of conducting research that is embedded in anti-colonial, anti-racist, and queer politics. I will give a brief overview of my approach to research-creation, pose some questions around queer-feminist approaches to research methods more broadly, followed by a few examples of my current research in English literary education.    

Biography

Sarah E. Truman is Senior Lecturer at The University of Melbourne and co-director of the Literary Education Lab. From 2022-2025 Dr. Truman is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow whose project focuses on youth cultural productions (science fiction) in mining and metropolitan communities in Australia, Canada, and Wales. Truman's latest monograph is Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation: Writing Pedagogies and Intertextual Affects (2022).

weave the promise of post-foundational inquiry through a series of provocations and propositions. The partial glimpses offered through images, poetry, and accounts of speculative research practices gesture towards the potential that doing research differently can make in the pursuit of making a difference in the world – research is understood as affective, unruly and ultimately activist in the difference it makes in how it comes about, in the act, and how it lingers and haunts long after (Manning, 2021). The paper works with a range of feminist theories and philosophies but is most heavily indebted to Haraway (2016) and her invitations to: serious play, go visiting, and to engage in practices of worlding to reorient both thought and practice. The paper seeks to address the question: what gets overturned or displaced when engaging in post-foundational research? The paper contests that complexifying what research is, how it is done, and what it generates involves bringing matter, affect, philosophy, ethics and theory together to push aside taken-for-granted practices and pursue research in an altogether different key.   

Biography

Dr Jayne Osgood is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University. Her work addresses issues of social justice through critical engagement with policy, curricular frameworks, and pedagogical approaches in Early Childhood Education & Care. She is committed to extending understandings of the workforce, families, gender and sexualities, ‘child’, and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts through creative, effective methodologies. She has published extensively within the post-modernist paradigm with over 100 publications in the form of books, chapters and journal papers. Her most recent books include Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Research Observation (2023); Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods (Bloomsbury, 2019); and Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art (Bloomsbury, 2p019). She has served on the editorial boards of various journals and is a long-standing board member at Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. She is currently editor for the journals: Gender & Education and Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology. She is also Book Series Editor for both Bloomsbury (Feminist Thought in Childhood Research) and Springer (Keythinkers in Education).

central role of data infrastructures in education, and the energy infrastructure needed to support their growing use in schools and school systems. It elaborates a need for a greater accounting of the climate and related social costs of these interwoven digital and energy infrastructures of schooling. This is part of the ‘disposition’ of the infrastructures of schooling that should be weighed into decisions on whether and how to continue with digital technologies in schools.  Three implications for education governance will be discussed, including greater consideration of: current school climate change infrastructures such as ‘eco school’ programs and ed tech ‘AI for good’ initiatives, pushes for ‘computing within limits’ without substantial changes, and current school governance practices which unnecessarily rely on digital infrastructures. Instead, what is needed may be a reversal of the extensive use of digital infrastructures by schools and education governance bodies.

Biography

Marcia McKenzie is Professor of Global Studies and International Education in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Lead of the Climate Communication and Education theme with Melbourne Climate Futures, and Co-lead of the Social Transformations and Education Academic Group at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists; and Director of the $4.5M SSHRC-funded Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education (MECCE) Project (www.mecce.ca), and of the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (www.sepn.ca). Her research program includes both theoretical and applied components at the intersections of comparative and international education, global education policy research, and climate and sustainability education, including in relation to policy mobility, place, affect, and other areas of social and geographic study. She is co-author of Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (Routledge, 2015) and Critical Education and Sociomaterial Practice: Narration, Place, and the Social (Peter Lang, 2016), and co-editor of Land Education: Rethinking Pedagogies of Place from Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives (Routledge, 2016) and Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment, and Education (Hampton, 2009); and co-edits the Palgrave book series Studies in Education and the Environment.

fuelled school-aged students’ political action across the world. Climate change ‘amplifies, compounds, and creates new forms of injustices’ which are ‘interlinked and interconnected’ (Sultana, 2021, p. 448); in settler colonial societies, these injustices are intimately entwined with colonial logics and extractive capitalism (Birch, 2018; Whyte, 2020). This seminar is a conversation between five members of a research team, which includes four paid research assistants who are 18-21 years old and active climate justice organisers. This team is working together on a project co-constructing accounts of school-aged students’ climate justice activism(s); the five members of the team have been part of the project’s design, consultation and preparation of institutional ethics application, and will conduct research interviews, analysis, and be involved in co-authoring and co-presenting processes. Differentially positioned across identity markers and embodied experiences, we are interested in co-creating stories that compel attention to the textures and nuances of diverse young people’s multi-modal activism(s), and to the political differences and resonances between and among young people involved in climate justice activism(s). In this seminar, we discuss some of the ethical, methodological and political challenges we are grappling with as we work together.

Biography

Eve Mayes (she/her) is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Deakin University in the School of Education (Research for Educational Impact). Eve is currently undertaking the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Fellowship (DECRA) project: Striking Voices: Australian school-aged climate justice activism (2022-2025). Her book The Politics of Voice in Education is forthcoming (Edinburgh University Press).

Natasha Abhayawickrama (she/ her) is a recently graduated year 12 student with four years of experience as a volunteer community organiser with School Strike for Climate (Sydney and national organiser) and Sapna South Asian Climate Justice Solidarity. In her organising role, she has facilitated student meetings, coordinated outreach and partnership working groups, and has received training in social movement theory and campaign strategy.

Sophie Chiew (she/her) is an undergraduate university student with three years of experience in community organising and fundraising with School Strike for Climate and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. Sophie has also volunteered as a youth advisor to Boroondara Council, a role which involved representing and collaborating with young people with diverse backgrounds and views. 

Netta Maiava (she/her) is an undergraduate student (Bachelor of International Studies, Development major, RMIT) and a volunteer community organiser for the Pacific Climate Warriors. Netta is currently undertaking an internship with 350 Pacific, and in her organising role, she has been involved with many projects. This experience and training have given her significant experiential knowledge of climate justice and activism.

Dani Villafaña (she/ her) is an undergraduate student and climate justice organiser with School Strike for Climate and Sweltering Cities, a small organisation focused on campaigning for cooler, more equitable cities (focusing on Western Sydney). She has also been an organiser in the sexual assault victim-survivor advocacy space, around the legislation of sex education and protections for survivors of gendered violence. She currently works as a campaigner with Fair Agenda.

the teaching and learning of complexity thinking, understanding and acting, all together described as complexity competence. Providing a language, conceptual framework, and practical strategy, Complexity Patterning supports students to engage effectively with complex phenomena. It is an embodied and experiential approach that can begin with students’ own lives and experience as the complex phenomenon of focus, aligning with recent pedagogical research stating that using a familiar phenomenon is most effective. Complexity Patterning engages a relational perspective of the world’s coming-into-being, and the co-generativity of our participation in emerging futures.

Biography

The success of implementing Complexity Patterning with secondary students inspired Dr. Shae Brown to undertake doctoral inquiry. With a passion to contribute to new paradigm education for the 21st century, Shae brings extensive experience teaching and learning in a wide range of educational settings. Having recently graduated with her doctorate, and attracting an award for her work with the International Society of Systems Science, Shae is currently exploring the most appropriate way to broaden access to this work. In the meantime, Shae is engaged in teaching, research assisting, and student advocacy at Southern Cross University.

politics of belonging, as expressed through children’s voices. Drawing on sentence starters, metaphor cards, and photovoice to gauge children's perceptions, I identify the physical, material, social, affective, and academic school environments where children experience affirmative or negative feelings of belonging, resulting from encounters of comfort, security, attachment, membership, and ownership. As evident through this socio-spatial lens, favourable physical and material environments alongside supportive social interactions were most likely to enable children’s positive experiences of school belongingness, and participation in learning.

Biography

Aspa Baroutsis is a senior lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Education. Aspa is known for her research in media sociology, focused on portrayals of teachers, teaching, and schools across traditional print and social media; learning engagement and student voice across mainstream and alternative school settings; and digital pedagogies and school learning spaces that support student belonging and participation. Her research has cross disciplinary reach within social and cultural studies, social geography, school architecture, and digital and media sociology.

Karen Barad’s concept of ethico-onto-epistemology by focusing on an ethics of relations that emerge within the specific social-material encounter and is read with brian massumi’s notion of enabling constraint, as a diffractive creation within the recounted events.

I focus here on mapping one exemplar girl student’s recount of her negotiation of the enabling constraints within pedagogical events, in situ. Her experiences are simultaneously agonistic and joyous and illustrate an affective undergoing of schooling processes. I map her navigation toward a seemingly affirming future.

This mapping highlights the importance of affective experiences within the ecology of classrooms and has consequences for students' ‘choosing’ subjects that frame them as a successful schoolgirl subject. Each pedagogical encounter discussed is considered as a unique, but connected event, making visible the differential potentials of capacity for affecting and being affected, enabling or disabling bodily action and growth with students that have consequences for matter and mattering. The cartography produced is not intended to form a prescriptive model for educationalists to follow but is intended to open up scrutiny of the consequences of affects that are in play for differentiated students as they negotiate school processes. I speculate how educationalists might enable a reimagining of numbing shame (non-belonging) as interest(ing) with the students themselves through recognizing enabling constraints existing in the classroom. I ask how can students and educators find comfort in their own discomfort as they emerge in events that may pose a threat to their identities, in order to metamorphose negative affect into a positive affirmation? Students emerge in situ and sculpt a performance of named (and apparently desirable) normative student behaviours within a contextual affective field. The field may be constrained but i ask how students can be enabled and shift these boundaries...as a making-of.

Biography

Melissa Wolfe is an educator with 20 years experience in the Australian public and private secondary education sector. She is also a photographer and film-maker. Melissa currently is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Methods, Media and Visual Arts education at Southern Cross University, Australia. Her research encompass a filmic synthesis of aesthetics, affect, gender, creative and public pedagogies.

two questions. The first, “Why this?,” which I find in Toril Moi’s writings about the method wars in literary criticism, pushes us to attend to deictic specificity: this is always singular, intimate, within reach. And it summons us to think about how what is here represents one possible configuration of world, spurring imaginative explorations of what could have been here as part of the class discussion. The second question comes from Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology: how does this thing arrive? This moves first through Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism, seeing “things” not as isolated entities emergent from labour and circulation. Ahmed’s account crucially pushes through Marxian anthropocentrism, though, seeing labour and relationality as more-than-human. Combined, these two questions enable education at any level—from early childhood through advanced graduate study—to attend closely to what is here and how it arrives, ultimately leading toward a conception of education (and agency) as always dispersed, where intimacies unfold across strange scales of time and space. We will consider, in conversation, how this pedagogy necessarily swerves into ecological attention.

Biography

Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond (USA), where he also coordinates the Humanities. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (Duke UP, 2019) as well as many articles in journals such as Curriculum Inquiry, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, Social Text, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and Journal of Curriculum Studies.

While the Global North discussion of decoloniality focuses on land issues, in this session, I will discuss de/coloniality from a broader global perspective, including agendas from once-colonized nations. I will expand beyond the usual and privileged tools used in academia to discuss de/colonial work to include absurdity, creativity, and healing as necessary accomplices. Tracing back historical literature of those who fought their colonizers using a multi-prong approach, I will present absurdity, creativity, and healing as forms of inquiry, analysis, and representation. Grounded in such discussion are issues of interconnectivity, the entanglement of liberation, oppression, and resistance, and building memories of a utopian future through creative, contemplative, and imaginative practices. Using AnaLouise Keating’s theorization of post-oppositionality and Sukumar Ray’s work on absurdity and nonsense literature, I cultivate transnational liminality in de/colonial work that eventually translates into theorizing such work through a culturally situated focus.

Biography

Dr Kakali Bhattacharya is a professor at University of Florida housed in Research, Evaluation, and Measurement Program. Her work has made spaces in interdisciplinary de/colonizing work and qualitative research where creativity and contemplative approaches are legitimized and seen as gateways for cultivating depth, integrity, expansive inquiry, and discovering critical insights. Substantively, she explores transnational issues of race, class, gender in higher education.

She is the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mid-Career Scholar of Color Award and the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mentoring Award from Division G: Social Context of Education. Her co-authored text with Kent Gillen, Power, Race, and Higher Education: A Cross-Cultural Parallel Narrative has won a 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from AERA (SIG 168) and a 2018 Outstanding Book Award from International Congress of Qualitative Research. She is the 2020 winner of Mary Frances Early College of Education Distinguished Alumni Award for research from the University of Georgia.

nature, intuitive knowing and creative impulses. Through sacred artworking, ritual and trance processes taking place in site-specific locations we can learn from and be guided by nature. Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial understanding of the art-making process of artworking “is to be humbled in the presence of spirit’s incarnation. Artworking is a process of encountering and breaking ourselves open to the lifeforce of the other….as a work of mourning [it] opens to grief and its companion mystery” (Bickel, 2020, p.4). I hold the desire that my artworkings will aesthetically and ethically awaken others to enter a matrixial alliance to reclaim their own inherent trance state abilities. Consciously entering trance opens possibilities for unlearning and learning. Unfolding an art, ritual and “trance-based inquiry” (Bickel, 2020), I will share an essay that dwells with eco gnosis and steps into the mystery of a 10 minute co-poietic art video I created that is entitled Eco Gnosis.

Bickel, Barbara (2020). Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World. Palgrave MacMillan.

Biography

Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, writer, teacher and Emerita Faculty of Art Education, Southern Illinois University. She co-founded and currently co-directs Studio M*: A Collaborative Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture & Healing in Canada where she teaches art as an inquiry process and engages socially-engaged art practices with the human and the more-than-human world. Her research interests include arts-based inquiry, a/r/tography as ritual, trance-based inquiry and learning, collaboration, socially-engaged art, matrixial theory, feminist spirituality, and restorative and transformative learning. She has published articles and book chapters widely in fields such as art education, curriculum, mothering studies, and visual art. Her art and performance rituals have been exhibited internationally and she is a co-founder and active member of the Gestare Art Collective (2009-). She is author of Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World, co-editor of the book Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching, and co-editor/curator of Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal.

Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe.

Morton has written Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (Open Humanities, 2021), All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

difficult and exciting terrain of new materialist thought, practice and ethics—that is, through what Barad calls its ethico-onto-epistemology. She signals with those hyphens, that these three ‘fields’, which we usually separate, are intimately and intricately entangled. In this paper I draw from the first chapter and will discuss how new materialist thought disrupts many of our taken-for-granted ways of thinking about and doing research. I will open up the question of what it is to be human, and more-than-human, in the flow in-between poetry, art, language and the social and physical world. I work with a poem, exploring the creative relationality that new materialist inquiry enables. St Pierre recommends that we abandon method and that, after a lot of reading, we begin wherever we are. That is good advice, perhaps. But understanding new materialist concepts and putting them into practice in our lives and in our research faces us with major challenges, challenges in thought-practice-ethics, in being-and-becoming, in going to places we don’t-yet-know, with ideas we don’t yet know how to think.

Biography

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar affiliated with Melbourne University, as Adjunct Professor, and Western Sydney University, where she is an Emeritus Professor. The distinctive features of her work are her development of experimental and collaborative ways of doing research, incorporating into her thinking and writing elements of the visual, literary and performative arts. Her writing engages with the conceptual work of poststructuralist and new materialist philosophers. Her most recent books are New Lives in an Old Land: Re-turning to the Colonisation of New South Wales through the Stories of my Parents and Ancestors ([2019]2021, Brill) and Entanglement in the World’s Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry (2021, Routledge).

affectively felt and cared for. To this end, our newest project, Fellow Feelings is an emerging transdisciplinary, intergenerational alliance to combat biodiversity loss by exploring both the cognitive and the affective dimensions of biodiversity. In our project statement we write “Combining ecological inquiry with education and biological art in the form of citizen science, Fellow Feelings provides innovative tools for monitoring change and fostering sustainable and strong multispecies community identities.” This talk will offer a peek behind or beyond this noble sounding objective and shed light to the frictions and conflicts of interests when bringing together natural scientists, social scientists, artists and young people, and aiming to co-create knowledge respectfully on both parties’ terms, and importantly: including also the viewpoints and interests of the other species or non-human individuals involved. The objective is to portray transdisciplinary scholarship as important, yet non-innocent, and to suggest ways forward.

Biography

Pauliina Rautio is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education (University of Oulu, Finland), and an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on human-environment relations in general, and recently on human-animal co-habitation and collaboration in specific. Pauliina is the Principal Investigator of two funded projects on young people’s relations to the significant or difficult other animals in their lives, and also a Senior Scholar of a transdisciplinary research hub ANTS (Biodiverse Anthropocene Natures and Transdisciplinary Science) at the University of Oulu. In her free time Pauliina runs a wildlife rehabilitation service at her home, caring for local injured wild birds.

published by Routledge in early/mid 2021. Learning to live with climate change begins with relational and affective ontologies of climate to explore the ways that we learn, with and as climate change, to live-with our rapidly changing world. Engaging with Australia's 2019/2020 bushfire season, and undergraduate emotional experiences of studying climate change, the book demonstrates that climate is inherently affective, and that attuning to and engaging with the affective experiences climate change engenders can, if done carefully, contribute to less-anthropocentric and more collective, climate subjectivities and responses.

Biography

Blanche Verlie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute. Blanche has a multidisciplinary background and works at the intersections between climate change, gender, culture, education, science studies, justice, emotions, affect and the more-than-human world. She has ten years’ experience teaching sustainability and climate change courses in universities and is currently co-editing (with Alicia Flynn from the University of Melbourne) a special issue of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education on the youth strikes for climate.

wider goals and visions of environmental education. This presentation provides a series of personal reflections on learning that emphasize a felt sense of queer animality, of historically and socioecologically-situated bodies that display “improper affiliations” within the rigid, heteronormative views of human being, non-human being, and natures in educational contexts. Narrated experiences of learning as, of, and with queer animals are the foundation for considering how queer ecopedagogies might help to enact a multispecies, environmental justice.

Biography

Joshua Russell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. He is also Director of the graduate program in Anthrozoology. Joshua’s scholarly work emerges from foundations in environmental education, animal studies, child-animal relations, queer pedagogy, and phenomenology. He is editor of the forthcoming book, Queer Ecopedagogies: Sexualities, Natures, and Education (Springer). Joshua lives in Niagara Falls, ON with his partner Sean and their rescue dog, Penny.

education research in relationship to diversity, creative democracy, and sustainability. Drawing from an ecocritical framework in education influenced by anarchism, ecofeminisms, critical animal studies, and abolitionist teaching he explicitly emphasizes a need for scholar-activist research—and teaching—that exposes human supremacy’s connection with the hierarchized rationalizing and justifying racism, sexism, ableism, and classism as cultural rather than given by nature. The stakes are high and the capacity of the planet for sustaining life and doing so with respect to cultural and biological diversity depends upon future generations learning to live in creatively, democratically, and at peace with the diverse ecosystems within which they reside. More than just a critique of anthropocentrism and a discussion to better understand scholar-activism and radical praxis; he will invite participants to have a conversation about the very real threats, dangers, and need for scholar-activism to be thoughtful, respectful, and in solidarity with a myriad of ways folks build communities and together recognise, resist, and reconstitute not only education but also how together (including our more-than-human cohabitants) creatively reclaim democracies in favour of multispecies inclusion, equity, and justice.

Biography

John Lupinacci is an Associate Professor at Washington State University. He conducts research and teaches in the Cultural Studies and Social Thought in Education (CSSTE) program using an approach that advocates for the development of scholar-activist educators. His ecocritical work in education is interdisciplinary and draws from critical social theory through anarchist philosophy, critical animal studies, ecofeminist philosophy and ecojustice education while recognizing that many of these Western frameworks are entangled with colonial cultures and thus ought not take precedence over—or appropriate—diverse indigenous knowledges. Drawing heavily from critical conceptions of environmental education and abolitionist teaching, Dr. Lupinacci’s research focuses on how people—specifically educators, educational leaders, and educational researchers—learn to both identify and examine destructive habits of Western industrial human culture and how those habits are taught and learned in schools. His experiences as a high school teacher, an outdoor environmental educator, and a community activist-artist-scholar all contribute to his research, teaching, and development of interdisciplinary research projects open to the impossibilities of unexpected spaces within education and educational research. He is co-author of the book EcoJustice Education (Routledge), co-editor of a scholar-activist zine Major Threat, co-host of talk radio show Bust-ED Pencils, and is on the editorial boards for Educational Studies, Critical Education, and Journal for Critical Media Literacy. He was recently recognized by the Washington Education Research Association (WERA) with the Research Award in 2018.

Tourism and Performative Autoethnographic-We. Writing in the voices of multiple-selves the thesis shares the autoethnographical journey through stories, ethnodrama, journaling and poetry of School Tourism including visits to Steiner Waldorf, Progressive, Democratic and Montessori education as well as more traditional settings using innovative educational approaches. After an epiphany at a visit to the Green School, Bali in 2016, realising that the Ideal School is an oxymoron, the research shifted.

Biography

Dr Alys Mendus completed a PhD in Education (2017, University of Hull, UK). Alys embodied her scholarship in Freedom to Learn from the University of Hull by living itinerantly in a van whilst in the UK and then travelling to 180 schools/places of learning who were educating differently to mainstream teaching in 23 countries. Alys now lives in Australia with her partner and is very busy having fun with their one-year-old daughter, Ginny, working as a Casual Academic for Southern Cross University and writing a book about performing School Tourism for Brill/Sense.