What Comes Before Collaboration: Exploring Political Agency With Environment in Mind

• In Event: Ethics, Politics, and Agency in Environmental Education

Abstract

Our intent in this presentation is to explore how environmental education (EE) researchers might critically re-engage root concepts of “action-activism-becoming” that constitute their political agency. We engage recent scholarship on the rapid expansion of notions of politics and political agency. We will reflect on how wider debates on participation in social/environmental issues account for ways of acting, affecting, impacting and “mapping” the political geographies of adults and children. We share several heuristics and conceptual mappings that have been useful in thinking/reconceptualizing our EE research processes within a “politics of emergence” for active collaborative work. Our presentation will explore several strategies that may help us to find our way into more meaningful and powerful collaborations with strategic political ends in mind.

Authors

• Catherine Hart, University of Regina

• Paul Hart, University of Regina