Art-science Activisms and Compost Methods for Common Worlds Pedagogies

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 3: Pedagogies

Abstract

Art-science activisms as articulated by Donna Haraway (2016) have emerged from informal and community context. Here I present them as a way of engaging common worlds pedagogies (Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., 2015) in schools that signposts a more-than-scientific way of knowing Earth systems in our local places. Here, I perform examples of the art-science activisms that are materialising as learning-teaching practices and research methods in my PhD inquiry with a high school in Naarm/Melbourne.

To fertilise the more-than-human ‘field’ of place pedagogies and ecological education research, the entangled methods in this research are dubbed ‘compost education’ (Haraway, 2016). By turning lessons from ecology and place pedagogies into a hotter compost pile with feminist-material, anticolonial, participatory practices as ‘common worlds pedagogies’ (Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., 2015), I try to make sense of how weekly, arts-based, interdisciplinary learning outside the classroom is a transversal act that takes multispecies lives seriously.

Over time and in diverse ways, students, teachers, participant-researchers have been performing relational, art-science practices that generate a sense of immersion in a more-than-human agential reality (Barad, 2007). These humble, seemingly insignificant, embodied practices increase our (students, teachers, researchers) capacity to imagine the relationships and events that are otherwise so big they are imperceptible or so small they are invisible. Practices that just might contribute to fashioning fertile places and building common worlds pedagogies at high school beyond the polemics of despair or hope (Haraway, 2016) that are fit for these precarious times.

Key words: common worlds pedagogies; compost methods; multispecies; art-science activisms; praxis; more-than-scientific; more-than-human; speculative feminisms; ecological feminism; anticolonial; place pedagogies; entanglement

Author

• Alicia Flynn, Melbourne Graduate School of Education (University of Melbourne)