Ethics of Closeness: Boundary Formation With a Leafcutter Bee’s Nest

• In Event: Waterways and Pedagogical Entanglements: Teaching, Learning, and Relating to Water and Its Multiple Meanings

Abstract

In this empirical paper, I address the research questions: What does (human) desire for closeness do to our approach to more-than-human entanglements? What environmental education is made possible by the productive constraints of respecting more-than-human boundaries? I will rhizomatically analyze my relationship with a leafcutter bee (Megachile spp.) nest as a situated example of practicing a relational ethic of care. Through queering the boundary (Barad, 2011) between myself and the leafcutter bee, I think with nature not as something I experience, but as something we produce through our human-and-more-than-human relationality. Rather than seeing limited proximity as prohibitive, environmental education can use this productive constraint to know-with more-than-human others in a way that disrupts the nature/culture binary.

Author

• Amalie Strange, Arizona State University