Abstract:Drawing on a posthuman lens we walk — with Deborah Bird Rose and her conceptual framing of shimmer. We explore shimmering as incorporating a sensorial richness, as beauty and grandeur, as constantly in flux, moving between past, future and back again. Shimmering has potentiality in a posthuman context in its encompassing of spiritual and ancestral energies and illumination of the human (settler) story of exceptionalism. By theorising shimmer with this posthuman lens, we acknowledge and honour the eco-ethico co… Show more
“…Indeed, we may, perhaps, epitomise love as: shimmering [an indigenous Australian concept that incorporates] a sensorial richness, as beauty and grandeur, as constantly in flux, moving between past, future and back again … In order to disrupt anthropocentricism and present a moral wake‐up call that glows from dull to brilliance in these precarious times, we bring to environmental education the potential of holding the shimmering past tracings of theory along with us on our journeys. (Malone et al, 2020, p. 129)…”
Section: Witnessing Love Plain and Simple In And Beyond The Mediamentioning
Representations of love appear across many disciplines and discursive fields that are and should be in conversation with geography. It is imperative that geographers engage in formidable but worthy tasks to distil diverse renderings of love into the regenerative interventions we urgently need. Those interventions require geographically minded interpretations of love to drive radical research, pedagogies, policies, and practices in ways that have direct and indirect effects across the life course and life worlds. Such labours are mediated by state and law, by intersectional relations, or by neuroscience, and involve asking how love underwrites critical infrastructures—of place (making), care and entanglements, colonialism, and human‐nature relations in the Anthropocene and posthuman—that lead to the flourishing futures we seek. Rich geographical studies oriented to those tasks still face charges of flattening difference. This commentary picks up one aspect of this agenda: a blind spot in geographical research relating to the ethical imperative to love based on benevolence. Instead, I champion the revolutionary possibilities for geography to inform policies, pedagogies, and practices by using a love based on alterity aligned with social weight, reasserting accessible science as an effective driver of social and system transformative changes. Specifically, I argue for a regenerative socio‐political analytic of love in a time of disaster, decolonisation, and diffraction.
“…Indeed, we may, perhaps, epitomise love as: shimmering [an indigenous Australian concept that incorporates] a sensorial richness, as beauty and grandeur, as constantly in flux, moving between past, future and back again … In order to disrupt anthropocentricism and present a moral wake‐up call that glows from dull to brilliance in these precarious times, we bring to environmental education the potential of holding the shimmering past tracings of theory along with us on our journeys. (Malone et al, 2020, p. 129)…”
Section: Witnessing Love Plain and Simple In And Beyond The Mediamentioning
Representations of love appear across many disciplines and discursive fields that are and should be in conversation with geography. It is imperative that geographers engage in formidable but worthy tasks to distil diverse renderings of love into the regenerative interventions we urgently need. Those interventions require geographically minded interpretations of love to drive radical research, pedagogies, policies, and practices in ways that have direct and indirect effects across the life course and life worlds. Such labours are mediated by state and law, by intersectional relations, or by neuroscience, and involve asking how love underwrites critical infrastructures—of place (making), care and entanglements, colonialism, and human‐nature relations in the Anthropocene and posthuman—that lead to the flourishing futures we seek. Rich geographical studies oriented to those tasks still face charges of flattening difference. This commentary picks up one aspect of this agenda: a blind spot in geographical research relating to the ethical imperative to love based on benevolence. Instead, I champion the revolutionary possibilities for geography to inform policies, pedagogies, and practices by using a love based on alterity aligned with social weight, reasserting accessible science as an effective driver of social and system transformative changes. Specifically, I argue for a regenerative socio‐political analytic of love in a time of disaster, decolonisation, and diffraction.
“…of the bison that brings forth a renewed politics that refuses present systems and subjectivities; opening us to situated and generative pedagogical possibilities and potentialities through a speculative engendering of imaginaries of not this, not yet and what if (Ashton, 2022). In the shimmer, there is always possibilities of becoming something other through the dynamic flux of changeability (Malone et al, 2020).…”
In this article, we experiment with a form of dark pedagogy, a pedagogy that confronts haunting pasts∼presents∼futures in environmental education. We offer a conceptualisation of ghosts that enables us to creatively explore the duration of things and consider the relationality of time. We examine this through two situated contexts, engaging with entangled, yet differentiated, socioecological issues. The first issue involves the cascading impacts of climate change on the Australian Alps, including intensifying bushfires and threats to the iconic snow gum. The second issue involves the reordering of human/animal relations through processes of settler colonialism that continue to transform land into a commodity, with a significant cultural and material consequence of such colonial harm resulting in the extermination of free-ranging bison herds in the Canadian prairies. Both are unique issues, but both involve impacts of colonisation, loss and natural-cultural hegemony. The dark elements of these Place-specific stories involve noticing and confronting loss and related injustices. In our case, we diffract such confrontations by thinking through these challenging issues and working towards ethical ways of living and learning. In this article, we (re)member ghosts and ponder practices for fostering anticolonial response-abilities and affirmative human/Earth futures.
“…I am aware of the danger of misappropriating Indigenous thinking as a researcher from the Global North, but I recognised and learnt that shimmer had the power to direct my attention to the capacity of music in doing relationships. Thinking about shimmer as a way of paying attention to the world offers a way of recognising the historicity we bring to our encounters in the here and now, which open potentials for the future (Malone, Logan, Siegel, Regalado & Wade-Leeuwen, 2020). Existing knowledges are brought to this moment that can be shared and built upon for the future for moving forward.…”
The author looks at how sound as noise is entangled with other bodies in the formation and maintenance of relationships amongst adults and young people in non-formal learning environments.
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