Water/Watery/Watering: Concepts for Theorizing in Environmental Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: A Critical Cartography of Theory in Environmental Education: Lines, Knots, and Knotting

Abstract

Posthumanism is not so much concerned with the question ‘what does a concept mean?’, but ‘how does it work on us and with us? The assemblage of water/watery/watering is a lively cartography of how water may be accounted for when theorising with and through environmental education research. Challenging the universalising claims of Western technoscience and the colonial logic of extraction, the paper develops an alternative theoretical mapping of environmental education through engagements with Ingold’s (2007; 2012; 2015) concepts of lines, knots and knottings, and grapples with the need to account for water differently in contemporary posthuman ecologies. To overcome anthropocentric and mastery-oriented approaches, various other ways to account for water in science or environmental education will continue to come to the surface, bubbling and rushing like a waterfall. Some of these will include thinking with water, which will be central to a theoretical mapping of water that seeks embrace sticky knots. The paper explores a (re)turn to artful practices and encounters as spaces in which posthumanist concepts for environmental education might be cultivated.

Authors

• Lexi Lasczik, Southern Cross University

• David Rousell, RMIT University

• Ferdousi A. Khatun, Southern Cross University

• Katie Beth Hotko, Southern Cross University

• Marie-Laurence Paquette, Southern Cross University

• Yaw Ofosu Asare, Southern Cross University

• Angela Foley, University of Western Sydney