David Rousell

Children of an Earth to Come: Speculative Fiction, Geophilosophy and Climate Change Education Research

Over the last 3 years, the Climate Change and Me project has mapped children and young peoples affective, creative, and ontological relationships with climate change through an emergent and child-framed research methodology. The project has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia, as coresearchers responding to the rapidly changing material conditions of the Anthropocene epoch. In this article, we position speculative fiction as a mode of creative research that enabled the young researchers to inhabit possible climate change futures. This node of the Climate Change and Me research was initiated by coauthor Jasmyne, who at the time was a year 7 student at a local high school. Through an ongoing series of visual and textual posts on the project web site, Jasmyne created an alternate world in which children develop mutant forces and bodily augmentations that enable them to resist social and environmental injustices. Drawing on these visual and textual entries in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattaris geophilosophy, we consider ways that speculative fiction might offer new conceptual tools for a viral strain of climate change education that proliferates through aesthetic modes of expression.

The invisible hand: Designing curriculum in the afterward

Abstract This paper diffracts a curriculum design workshop via online collaboration of a collective emerging from that event. Through the workshop, involving theory, conceptual art, writing, photography and curriculum planning, and the subsequent sharing of words and images, we move beyond interrogating designs for future subjects to asking how the pedagogical imagination composes both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within ecologies continually transforming in the process of making. We complicate ‘delivery’ or ‘conduit’ metaphors of education and perceive ‘design’ in co-compositions of human and nonhuman elements, resisting stasis, resisting closure. This workshop paper positions design in the realm of the artist–activist, rather than that of the bureaucrat–technician, and shifts intentionality beyond the invisible and controlling hand of humanism, as curriculum design we might do in the afterwards, rejecting instrumentalism.

Education for what? Shaping the field of climate change education with children and young people as co-researchers

ABSTRACT Children and young people are often positioned as the next generation of leaders in whom the public imagines or expects to overcome the legacies of climate and environmental inaction. Increasingly analyses of progress in environmental education independently identify the need for researchers and teachers to ‘listen to children’s voices’. In this paper we argue that climate change education presents a significant platform not only for youth voices, but also for a genuine activation of children’s political agency in schools, universities, and the public domain. In so doing, we draw upon the government funded project Climate Change + Me, which has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers investigating young people’s voices in climate change. We conclude that climate change education can open up an entirely new field of educational experience and inquiry when it is inclusive of and led by young people.

Mapping the data event: a posthumanist approach to art education research in a regional university

This chapter aims to rework humanist understandings of data in art|education|research by developing the ‘data event’ as a methodological concept which is productive for post-qualitative inquiry. Working with data as event involves a posthumanist reconceptualisation of art|education|research practice that does not separate sensorial data from the dynamic, relational occasions in which they are produced and encountered. This means that the ‘data event’ is inherently resistant to interpretation, reflection and representation, whether artistic, scientific or linguistic. In exploring the implications of a posthumanist ontology of data in art|education|research, the chapter works through a series of conceptual operations as they have been developed through the States and Territories project undertaken in a regional university. The process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze operate as touchstones throughout the chapter, as they engender diffractive encounters with recent theoretical movements associated with posthumanism and post-qualitative research.

Propositions for an environmental arts pedagogy : a/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality

This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children’s social and environmental worlds. This leads us to engage with the movements and materialities of learning environments as they come to co-compose pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we draw on new materialist accounts of matter as agentic, fluid and dynamic; movement as a choreographic architecting of experience; and a/r/tographic approaches to pedagogical engagement and embodied practice. Taking up the use of concepts as methods, we develop a series of artistic and pedagogical experimentations with concepts of ‘corridors’, ‘flight’, ‘viscosity’ and ‘construction’. In teasing out the implications of these concepts for an environmental arts pedagogy, we combine imagery and text to both render and diagram the movement of bodies, materials and environments in passage through each of these four conceptual enactments. This leads us to develop a series of propositions for an environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to sketch the contours of an environmental arts pedagogy that combines the speculative imagination with embodied, sensorial, and empirical experiences.

The Mesh of Playing, Theorizing, and Researching in the Reality of Climate Change: Creating the Co-research Playspace

This chapter develops the concept of the ‘co-research playspace’ as a methodological figure for working with children as co-researchers and co-artists. This concept emerged through our collaborative research and artistic co-production with 135 children who participated in the Climate Change and Me project (2014-2016) in Northern NSW, Australia. Drawing on Winnicott’s concepts of ‘transitional space’ and ‘transitional objects’ in relation to children’s art and environmental play, we locate the co-research playspace within the mesh of children’s playing, theorising and researching in the reality of climate change. In developing the concept of the co-research playspace, we specifically focus on that ways that iPads functioned as transitional objects within the Climate Change and Me project. This leads us to further analyse the ways that children used digital video as a ‘transitional medium’ that allowed them to experiment with new forms of co-production and creative resistance. Through our analysis of films produced by children in the project, we outline a series of three political-aesthetic modes of response to climate change that break with the predominant moralistic discourse surrounding the issue: I. critical interventions in public space; II. wild, absurd, and improvisational disruptions; and III. the creation of thought experiments and alternative worlds. The chapter concludes with the consideration of ‘children as para-academic researchers’, a concept that emphasises children’s abilities to invent their own modes of co-creation and critical inquiry that disrupt normative research protocols and associated adult expectations.

Uncommon Worlds: Toward an Ecological Aesthetics of Childhood in the Anthropocene

In addressing the need for a more robust engagement with aesthetics in posthumanist studies of childhood and nature, this chapter makes some tentative steps towards an ecological aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. In doing so, the chapter takes an alternative theoretical approach from much of the ‘common worlds’ scholarship that has emerged in recent years, while making the case for a new aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to the accelerating social, technological, and environmental changes of the Anthropocene epoch. Our approach foregrounds the singularity of children’s aesthetic experiences as relational-qualitative ‘intensities’ that alter the fabric of nature as an extensive continuum held in common. We therefore argue that every moment in the life of a child is an uncommon and unrepeatable occasion through which the common world of nature is felt, perceived, and experienced differently. This eco-aesthetic approach is developed further through the analysis of photographs taken by children as part of the Climate Change and Me project, which has mapped children and young people’s affective responses to climate change over a period of three years in New South Wales, Australia. Rather than working with images as representations or analogic signifiers for children’s experience, we analyse how each photograph co-implicates children’s bodies and environments through affective vectors of feeling, or ‘prehensions’. This leads us to reframe aesthetic notions of image, sensibility, perception, and causality in relational terms, while also acknowledging the individuation of childhood experiences as ‘creaturely becomings’ that produce new potentials for environmental thought and behaviour.

Doing Little Justices: Speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics

Abstract This article develops a series of speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics that is responsive to the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. The article is framed within a new materialist approach to environmental education, and specifically works to re-imagine the notion of justice in terms of performative gestures, multiplicities, processes, and speculative thought experiments. Drawing on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy in conjunction with recent new materialist thought, the article proposes the concept of ‘doing little justices’ as a way of enacting micropolitical interventions into everyday patterns of environmental thought, learning, sociality, and behaviour. The concept of ‘little justices’ is further elaborated through the analysis of vignettes that problematise issues of climate change, human exceptionalism, ecological sovereignty, and environmental justice with university students in the fields of education and the philosophy of law. The article concludes that an immanent ethics cannot be reduced to a set of predetermined values or prescriptions for environmental education, but should proceed through a speculative process of creative experimentation and negotiation in the pursuit of unforeseen openings and potentials for co-existence.