Queer Evolution: (Re)Invigorating Environmental Education Through Queer Interpretations of Evolutionary Onto-Epistemological Choreography

• In Event: 63.062 - Queer Eco-Pedagogies: Explorations in Nature, Sexuality, and Education

Abstract

Donna Haraway (2017) calls for a “new new synthesis” drawing on transdisciplinary work across biological fields, including ecological and evolutionary developmental biology (eco-evo-devo biology), the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. Relatively few scientists/scholars have proposed alternative (re)interpretations of evolution, and even fewer attempt to extrapolate the significance of such alternatives into other disciplinary fields. Noteable exceptions include Henri Bergson’s (1911) creative evolution, Lynn Margulis’s (1998) symbiogenesis, Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers’s (2012) involutionary momentum, Gilles Deleuze’s creative involution (see S.E. Gontarski, 2012) and Elizabeth Grosz’s (2011) work on sexual selection. Drawing on such creative work we will attempt to (re)imagine and (re)invigorate environmental education by queering evolutionary theory – challenging normative conceptions of “mechanistic” natural selection – focusing instead on creative and speculative practices of collective multispecies flourishing. Environmental education content is often connected explicitly to notions of environmental change, evolution, natural selection, and human impacts on these processes. This essay will explore what Jamie Lorimer (2015, p. 68) terms the “ontological choreography” of evolution, attempting to put “accepted knowledges at risk” by drawing on new research in eco-evo-devo biology to performing what Haraway (2008, p. xxvi)) calls “queer re-worlding.”

Authors

• Chessa Adsit-Morris

• Noel Gough, La Trobe University