More Than Human

ABSTRACT The article examines the 2012 work The Algae Opera, a performance combining human and nonhuman agents conceptualized by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta, in the context of biosemiotic considerations of performative agency in the Anthropocene. The article will respond to the question of how performance can contribute to post-anthropocentric notions of performativity by emphasizing that the more-than-human relationality in the performance results from the multiple entanglements of human bodily activities with nonhuman environmental and metabolic processes. As I will indicate, referring to a new materialist theoretical framework, even though on the verge of ecological disaster, Burton Nitta’s project – which investigates humans’ future in the context of the climate crisis, natural resource scarcity and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene–does not look at the tragic position of the human but instead redesigns the human body with materials –discursive, natural and cultural elements –to prove that any artistic practice can be produced ‘with and for’, rather than ‘of or about’, other species. In this sense, The Algae Opera becomes algae/human sharable-experience, highlighting that performative engagement in the world entails intimate responsibility (Barad 2007).

How place is conceptualized impacts the way everyday moments and relationships unfold. This paper explores possibilities for shifting our practices by engaging with an ethic of doing. Drawing on ecofeminist, nomadic, and Indigenous perspectives, we aim to open up space for more accountable, political practices that acknowledge the diverse realities of the children and youth we work with. We present vignettes from our practices to illustrate possibilities for (re)conceptualizing the deeply embedded, normative colonial assumptions in the places we work, and introduce political, contextual, and messy ways of doing in place.

In this paper, I explain how I engaged with walking as a sensory and relational inquiry that provoked thinking differently and intra-actively of research, and the entanglement (Barad, 2007) of our bodies with the space and matter. As I walked the city of Memphis, assemblages of my emplaced body movement, subjectivities, senses, feelings, and interactions with the materiality of the space deconstructed and interrogated the neoliberal normalized narratives of othering and belonging. Situating the walks within transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2012), transmateriality (Springgay & Truman, 2017a), and the spactimematter entanglement (Haraway, 2015), I share how these walks generated three lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari,1987) that transformed my thinking of research methods and opened up spaces for new ways of knowing beyond the linear and the prescribed. The three lines of flight, I discuss in this paper, informed and shaped my thinking of: my research methods with respect to interviewing ...

Abstract Drawing on New Materialist frameworks for environmental and sustainability education, we extend and deepen our understanding of contemporary place-responsive pedagogies in the light of our human-impacted geological epoch, the Anthropocene, and its allied environmental concerns. Empirically, in a new and original way, we explore the role of the more-than-human in educators’ planning and enactment of place-responsive pedagogies. We show that place-responsive pedagogies are derived from ongoing attunements reciprocally made by all participants to each other – educators, learners, and the more-than-human – and between the place of learning and these participants. Findings show that these attunements emerge from socio-environmental processes and features of a place, but this article also shows the critical importance of (i) what educators and learners are able to notice and respond to, (ii) how educators choose to build upon this noticing and response-making, and (iii) how they actively incorporate the agencies of the more-than-human into teaching and learning. Wider implications for researching environmental and sustainability education are considered.

How place is conceptualized impacts the way everyday moments and relationships unfold. This paper explores possibilities for shifting our practices by engaging with an ethic of doing. Drawing on ecofeminist, nomadic, and Indigenous perspectives, we aim to open up space for more accountable, political practices that acknowledge the diverse realities of the children and youth we work with. We present vignettes from our practices to illustrate possibilities for (re)conceptualizing the deeply embedded, normative colonial assumptions in the places we work, and introduce political, contextual, and messy ways of doing in place.